| |||||||||||||
Preparing for nonvolatile RAMPreparing for nonvolatile RAMPosted May 30, 2012 1:36 UTC (Wed) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432)In reply to: Preparing for nonvolatile RAM by paulj Parent article: Preparing for nonvolatile RAM
If you don't have a filesystem model you don't have a VFS and you don't have filesystems. I'm really quite surprised at the pushback here. It's an idea. Don't get bent out of shape.
(Log in to post comments)
Preparing for nonvolatile RAM Posted May 30, 2012 4:43 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
There are a lot of people who have advocated eliminating filesystems.
However, they have always run into the stumbling block that it's just impractical to deal with all hunks of data in a flat namespace. Directories are EVIL, but nobody has make anything else work even one tenth as well
Also, just keeping everything in ram falls apart as soon as you want someone else to access it (or you loose the device, or the device gets destroyed, or ...)
Many of the people pushing back have been though this "eliminate filesystems" experiment before and have the scars to show for it. Listen and learn (then go try and build something to prove them wrong :-)
Preparing for nonvolatile RAM Posted May 31, 2012 19:35 UTC (Thu) by timka.org (guest, #53366) [Link] Dmitry Zavalishin, the author of Phantom OS (which "eliminates filesystems"), was asked the question about removable storage when he was giving a talk about the OS at HighLoad++ in 2009.His idea is to start a separate Phantom VM for a removable media which then can be seen as another "host" accessible via "network". AFAIU, this means Phantom's native IPC is substituted by some protocol. Smells somewhat like Plan 9 to me.
Preparing for nonvolatile RAM Posted May 30, 2012 4:52 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
But you said you would still have a layer to provide user-friendly namespace, and a translation between that and the actual memory handles. You seem to think the current VFS is far more than that, that the current VFS does things like block-IO buffering and has other arcane IO related knowledge. So where does the VFS have anything like that?
Preparing for nonvolatile RAM Posted May 30, 2012 14:54 UTC (Wed) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]
The VFS doesn't. The fs layers and drivers do.
I think the discussion is pretty pointless now...
|
|||||||||||||