Xfs file size, inode size and block size

Question

ll /srv/node/dcodxx/test.sh
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7 Nov  5 11:18 /srv/node/dcodxx/test.sh

The size of the file is shown in bytes. This file is stored in an xfs filesystem with block size 4096 bytes.

xfs_info /srv/node/sdaxx/
meta-data=/dev/sda               isize=256    agcount=32, agsize=7630958 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=244190646, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=119233, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

Does this mean that a block can house more than one file, if not what happens to the remaining bytes (4096-7)? Also, where is the 256 bytes reserved for an inode stored, if it stored in the same block as the file, shouldn't the file size be larger(256+7)?

Answer 1

File data is stored in units of the filesystem block size, and no block sharing is currently possible across multiple files on XFS. So used disk space is always the number of bytes in the file rounded up to the next block size - a 1-byte file will consume 4k of diskspace on a 4k block size filesystem.

The inode itself contains file metadata such as size, timestamps, extent data, etc - and on xfs it can also contain extended attribute information.

The on-disk inode is separate from the file data blocks, and will always consume 256 bytes on a filesystem with 256 byte inodes, regardless of the amount of metadata used. If more than 256 bytes is required to store additional extent information or extended attribute data, additional filesystem-block-sized metadata blocks will be allocated.