On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:59:36 +0100, Benny Lofgren <bl-li...@lofgren.biz>
wrote:
On 2012-02-09 00.38, Chris Cappuccio wrote:
Benny Lofgren [bl-li...@lofgren.biz] wrote:
(For example, I'd love to see Jeff Robertson's and Kirk McKusick's
work on soft update journaling that went into FreeBSD 9 in OpenBSD
as well. Had I the time I'd look into it myself (it's a *lot* of work
from what little I've seen of it, but no doubt it would be FUN work)
but alas I don't at the moment, so all I can do is post this wish. :-)
It might be FUN to use when it's actually working. But if porting it
over and teasing out the bugs was all that much fun, you think someone
would have reaped those rewards by now. Actually, data loss is really
not much fun. Softupdates is one of the worst, because while it has
'worked' for years, it has had major bugs for a long time, complete
with hard to reproduce, hard to diagnose problems. If this make -j8
hang is another softdep problem, that's just another testament to how
much FUN it really is. If George Soros were to fund OpenBSD
development, and all the developers could permanently live in a palace
in the Swiss Alps, softupdates work might be considered fun. In that
case, OpenBSD would end up with its own custom modern filesystem,
written by someone who didn't kill their wife. I
think the Soros/Swiss Alps idea is an excellent one.
Well, according to the OP the make problem turned out to be hardware
related, as you may have seen by now.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion and whatever banter you feel
the need to dish out get your point across, but I actually DO like to
work on complex file system code (although I've hardly touched any in
a decade or so) so yes, I would consider it a fun and rewarding task.
Really. :-)
I've run very large, very heavily utilized softdep enabled filesystems
for years and years and have never, not once, lost data. That's anecdotal
evidence for sure, and I don't doubt there are or have been nasty bugs in
the code, but in my opinion the current OpenBSD ffs/ffs2 implementation
is nonetheless *very* stable and mature.
My servers very rarely crash - they run OpenBSD after all - but when they
do it's frustrating to wait for hours for the fsck:s to complete (my file
systems are usually rather big), so I'd love to have a journaling or
logging file system with matching stability to choose from in OpenBSD.
But since one hasn't magically materialized yet I've begun to look around
for likely candidates for implementation in OpenBSD, and the most likely
route I've found so far is journaling softdep.
Take a look of hammer2
http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/2012/02/09/9173.html . This a modern
FS and the developers wants to build a version more portable than the
original hammer.
But you're right, the FS will not be implemented magically and without a
lot of efforts.
I've never pretended to have the final answer to anything, but if *I*
were to try to implement something I'd probably look to journaling
softdep
first, because I think it's got potential and might well be the path of
least resistance to achieving a working port.
Also I'm of course not expecting anyone else to do a single minute's
worth
of free work to satisfy MY needs. I tried to word my mail carefully to
avoid
people getting that impression, but maybe I failed.
Regards,
/Benny
--
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado http://juanfra.info
