Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 20:44 UTC (Tue) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103)
In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by dlang
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Well, how do you stabilize it? By getting it into the hands of users. File systems don't stabilize themselves unless people actually start making use of this.

I think using it in this logic is a great way to get the stabilization process sped up, because we will get it into the hands of people that way, but we don#t actually really care about the data placed in the btrfs volumes (at least initially): it is exclusively vendor-supplied, verified, read-only data. If the file system goes bad, we just download the stuff again, and nothing is lost. It's a nice slow adopt path we can do here...

Actually, we can easily start adopting this by just pushing the runtimes/os images/apps/frameworks into a loopback btrfs pool somewher in /var. This file system would only be mounted into the executed containers and apps, and not even appear in the mount table of the host...

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 3, 2014 10:09 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (2 responses)

No Lennart. Users, the kind that cannot diagnose and fix a kernel bug, do not help stabilize anything. They can only suffer, although some will not do it silently.

Put it in the hands of developers. Or volunteers. But please! Let users alone.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 3, 2014 18:49 UTC (Wed) by ermo (subscriber, #86690) [Link]

First of all, LWN is almost per definition not a forum where end users congregate. Second, I assume Lennart is talking about users in the "early-adopter" category of which developers are implicitly a part and not necessarily someones tech-averse grandmother?

I also happen to think that Lennart is correct in taking the longer view that btfrs needs to be included gradually in the ecosystem if it is ever to become a mature, trusted, default Linux FS.

There will be bumps in the road, sure, that's a given. But Lennart's point that he wants to ease the pain by starting off with storing non-essential data (in the easily replaceable sense) in btfrs while this process is onging, is IMHO both sound and valid.

Others may see it differently, of course.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 5, 2014 20:06 UTC (Fri) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link]

I don't think that Lennart means that the end users should fix the problems. I assume here that he like every one else that performs large scale distribution understands that the real QA does not start until you get the end users to run your software.

You can perform all the QA you want internally and yet some random user with his random setup and random hardware till find tons of bugs on the first day of use.