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Whither btrfsck?Whither btrfsck?Posted Oct 11, 2011 21:23 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059)In reply to: Whither btrfsck? by jcm Parent article: Whither btrfsck?
"It ate my data once, so it will never be getting a second chance."
Do you think it is practical to have that strict-sounding an attitude with more mainstream parts of linux? Ever had a data-corruptor kernel bug? Or a crash with a corrupted filesystem? Or a hard drive model fail?
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Whither btrfsck? Posted Oct 12, 2011 0:13 UTC (Wed) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]
The problem is that people do have this attitude. I work with developers who don't like Red Hat because of what they did in 1999. I work with people who prefer Debian because of "RPM Hell". I've worked with people who hate Perl because of the quality of code written in Perl 3. I've worked with people who have sworn never to use a Seagate disk because of that great problem they had back in 2003 or whatever.
To repurpose http://xkcd.com/242/, maybe scientists can afford the time to see if the same problem happens again later. But sysadmins and programmers tend to be under pressure to produce results, and lots of them can't afford the time to retest their assumptions later. The better ones I've seen test new things out or test their assumptions out at home or on test systems in spare time. The cowboys test them on live systems in production and then wonder why everyone gets upset.
I agree we should all be able to test out btrfsck and have the code in the open so that people can contribute ideas about those corner cases and weird fuzzy problems that Chris might not have thought about. But if there are already people complaining that btrfs is eating their data, then releasing btrfsck early and buggy is only going to hurt its reputation. That's why I support Chris's decision to hold onto it for now. I'm sure he's trying to do the right thing but it's his decision to make.
Have fun,
Paul
Whither btrfsck? Posted Oct 12, 2011 19:46 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
Paul: that argument seems like it would support Chris *not releasing the FS code*. But as the article makes clear, that wasn't the case. It's *only* the fsck that's not in the wild.
Whither btrfsck? Posted Oct 12, 2011 0:52 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
As Paul points out, people have this attitude (and I'm one of them sometimes). I'm a scientist and I'm all for zapping myself with magic lightening machines (see xkcd reference cited below) on my own dime and at home, but if I were a sysadmin again I wouldn't be doing that with other people's valuable data. I'd be saying "gee, reiserfs bit me once so now it has to go out of its way to prove that I should use it over something I know is just going to work". This is also why in the real world people are still running OS releases from several years ago, and why they want them supported for the next million years. Because it works and that's all they want.
Whither btrfsck? Posted Oct 12, 2011 8:23 UTC (Wed) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link] I think that's all fine, as long as we have enough people zapping themselves with btrfs in their homes[1]. A problem that I frequently heard cited with mainframe OSs is that every customer buys the latest release the moment it comes out and then waits for six to twelve months before installing it since they know it is less stable than what they want.This makes absolute sense from an individual customer's point of view, but is extremely counterproductive on a global scale since many bugs that matter in real life only get found in real-life conditions. At this point I would like to thank everybody who is running the latest kernel or distro snapshots and writes bug reports about them. [1] Me included, will gladly donate broken root fs image to btrfsck testing now that I copied all the readable data to a new partition.
Whither btrfsck? Posted Oct 12, 2011 19:47 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
I Am Not A VM Guy... but what I know of them suggests that
> A problem that I frequently heard cited with mainframe OSs is that every customer buys the latest release the moment it comes out and then waits for six to twelve months before installing it since they know it is less stable than what they want.
isn't actually true: I would assume the load the new OS in a VM or LPAR, and dump test loads on it to see if it works, before promoting it to production.
Hardware-level virtualization makes that stuff easy...
Whither btrfsck? Posted Oct 12, 2011 20:19 UTC (Wed) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link]
You're right, I oversimplified. What tends to happen is that people wait half a year after the release, then install the new OS into a test partition and test for another six months before putting the system into production.
The times are obviously different depending on how paranoid the admin is and on the type of workload.
However, there are still good reasons for waiting: The bugs you encounter while running the new software on your test partition are often different from the bugs that other people encounter while running the same software in production. If you care a lot about stability, you probably want to have both kinds of problems solved before you get to the point of no return.
Whither btrfsck? Posted Oct 13, 2011 13:35 UTC (Thu) by pspinler (subscriber, #2922) [Link]
Speaking as a VM guy, you're mostly right, except that we do our new releases in a 2nd level virtual.
VM is pretty cool, and it makes a neat platform to run linux on. :-)
-- Pat
Whither btrfsck? Posted Oct 13, 2011 15:06 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
And that's a conversation I'd like to have with Someone Who Knows, off line, in much greater detail, Pat... :-)
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