LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems

Posted Jan 20, 2007 1:07 UTC (Sat) by bluefoxicy (guest, #25366)
In reply to: LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems by oak
Parent article: LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems

That whole argument is silly. Fault tolerant systems don't COME TO A SCREECHING HALT when they have a fault. When the file system driver dies on Minix, it comes back and life goes on. On Linux, the world stops.

Notice that you can keep going on after disk/FS driver crashes? Know what else you can do? Make logs of the state of the driver at crash (ever core dump a file system?). Linux can do this with kexec and some tricks, although you still could suffer data loss from other applications or manage to critically damage the FS.

What else is interesting is drivers are all small and isolated. The only information you need is the state of the driver; and the driver uses itself entirely. To debug a component, you debug that component; you don't have to worry about the blurred, gray lines between drivers and VFS and such. Things are easier to chew in small bites.