Quotes of the week

[Posted January 1, 2020 by corbet]

By default Reiser5 offers distribution based on algorithms (so-called fiber-striping) invented by Eduard Shishkin (patented stuff). With our algorithms all your data will be distributed evenly and fairly among all devices-components of the logical volume. It means that portion of IO requests issued against each device is equal to relative capacity of that device assigned by user. Operation of adding/removing a device to/from a logical volume automatically invokes data migration, so that resulted distribution is also fair.

— Edward Shishkin announces the Reiser5 filesystem

By getting rid of the blocking pool, and making /dev/random work like getrandom with flags set to 0, we're effectively abandoning any kind of assertion that /dev/random is some kind of TRNG [true random number generator]. This is not insane; this is what the *BSD's have always done.

— Ted Ts'o

This is theoretically the most expensive bit of research I've ever done for the bufferbloat project, in a matter of hours I'll have violated copyright ~800 times, which is about 200m dollars at 250k per.

— Dave Täht

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 2, 2020 19:15 UTC (Thu) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]

Shishkin doesn't address redundancy -- this is a great example of a software engineer not asking "how might this fail?”

It's a file system, more than any other program we should ask "why should we trust your code?" There's no mention of a test suite so that I can put it through its paces on throwaway loopback devices and old hardware.

But conceptually, it's inconceivable in 2020 that you'd spread your data over multiple spindles without having a plan for over or more of those disks to fail. I couldn't trust my data to something that could eat a chunk of it, probably all of it given the distribution algorithm, if one of the disks failed.

K3n.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 2, 2020 21:30 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (2 responses)

Reiser5? Should be renamed, I would think. Best not to name your codebase after a known murderer.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 2, 2020 21:47 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Well, you can say that it has a killer feature.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 4, 2020 16:31 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

This meme is getting pretty tiring in an era where we as an industry cheerfully herd our clientele into the GAFAM-branded meat grinder of panopticon slavery. Namesys does not have the high score for body count among Linux contributors. Get some new material.