The 2006 Linux File Systems Workshop

The 2006 Linux File Systems Workshop

First, the author is stated as "Valerie Henson", whereas the organizer of the workshop is (among others) "Val Henson". I suppose the two are one and the same ? (allthough then it's a bit strange talking about oneself in the rhird person)

Second, the observation that i/o to discs aren't keeping up with the size of the discs is an obvious one. And that will certainly have effects on the design of filesystems.

I do have one question about the fsck-times.

I was under the impression that fsck "only" checks and corrects filesystem metadata, without touching the the actual contents of the files. If that's so, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect fsck-performance to scale according to the number of elements in the filesystem instead of according to the size of the filesystem ?

I'm thinking, the number of elements is growing much more slowly than the size of the filesystem, since the average size of an element is almost certainly growing.

Even for the same sort of data, 5 years ago a picture from my digicam was maybe 300K (3 mpix, jpeg) today it's still one file, but more like 10MB. (8mpix, raw) The same is true for that kernel-tarball, it's still one file, but it's a lot larger than it used to be.

But stronger than this effect is the effect caused by new types of files being storable (and thus stored) on larger discs. Noone stored a small collection of 10 handy DVD-isos in their homedirectory ten years ago. Today its trivial to do so, and basically everyone I know has one or more complete isos stored as a single file.

When I first started using linux, 1.2.13 kernel, P-75 even storing the single cdrom it was delivered on (Slackware, still divided up in "floppy sets") on hard-disc was unreasonable, as that would command a large fraction of the disc.

In short; the capacity of the discs will (as projected) go up by a factor of 16 or so until 2013. Isn't it reasonable to expect that the number of files stored will go up by a much smaller factor ?