That massive filesystem thread

Posted Apr 1, 2009 21:37 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: That massive filesystem thread by bojan
Parent article: That massive filesystem thread

It is a worthless effort. Each filesystem must keep its house clean. Why invent a new system call which cannot (by necessity) be honored by ext2, or ext4 without a journal? Everything is working now fine in ext3, and if it doesn't work right in ext4 people will just look for a different filesystem.

After reading that Linus is not pulling from Mr Tso's trees made me suspect. Well, now that Ts'o's commit rights have been officially revoked I think that the whole discussion is moot. I wonder if the next ext4 head maintainer will learn from this painful experience and just do the right thing.

ext4 trees

Posted Apr 1, 2009 21:46 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm confused. The article said that Ted's trees had not been pulled yet. In fact, that happened today; a bunch of ext4 work went into the mainline, including a number of patches which increase robustness for applications which don't use fsync(). I dunno what you were trying to link to, but it didn't work. I've not seen anything about revocation of commit rights. (It's hard to "revoke commit rights" in a distributed system in any case; at worst you can refuse to pull from somebody else's repository.)

Maybe it's an April 1 post that went over my head?

Recursive linking

Posted Apr 2, 2009 6:21 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Sorry, it was a stupid attempt from a foreigner at an April Fools' prank :D I was hoping that the recursive link would give it away, but maybe it was too plausible altogether.

Will try to do better next time :D)

That massive filesystem thread

Posted Apr 1, 2009 22:38 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Just a few points, so please don't get offended. I apologise in advance to all sensitive LWN readers for any injury caused by this post.

> Why invent a new system call which cannot (by necessity) be honored by ext2, or ext4 without a journal?

Even if there was some kind of magical law that said that you could not order commits on the non-journaled file system this way, it can always be trivially implemented through - wait for it - fsync(), which has acceptable performance characteristics on such file systems.

> Everything is working now fine in ext3

Sure. Except fsync(), which locks the whole system for a few seconds. Hopefully, this will get fixed (or at least its effect reduced) as a result of the hoopla.

> Well, now that Ts'o's commit rights have been officially revoked I think that the whole discussion is moot.

Now you are really making a fool of yourself.