Errors are not stupid

Posted Apr 9, 2025 18:20 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
Parent article: An update on torn-write protection

> Hellwig said that the developers should fix the instrumentation of the system ""instead of creating stupid interfaces"".

Facepalm. Silently failing behind the scenes is the _worst_ possible interface. And the suggested "fix" is to add a source-code specific tracepoint? Really?

Errors are not stupid

Posted Apr 10, 2025 18:57 UTC (Thu) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah.. The users for this feature are going to be people who seriously care about perf. They will certainly want to fix the misconfiguration, and not just run in whatever slow path.

Silently taking a fallback path just makes the problem harder to diagnose.

This would be a good choice for a simple high-level API that targets a wide audience, where people might not want to be bothered with any low-level details, perhaps.

Errors are not stupid

Posted May 19, 2025 21:55 UTC (Mon) by ju3Ceemi (subscriber, #102464) [Link]

Is it ? This feature would be used by every databases, which would stop doing double writes with their WAL

I cannot understand how "brick the system" is a good solution

Slowing down and pushing an error on dmesg seems quite sane to me: users would have the information, and the performance would be .. what we have today (or a bit better, perhaps ?)