Thor Lancelot Simon <t...@panix.com> writes: > On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 06:09:31PM -0700, Konrad Schroder wrote: >> >> There has been quite a lot of work on LFS in the last 20 years, some with >> hints of a roadmap.?? Does anyone else have specific ideas about the most >> glaring issues, or what should be done next? > > I have been looking at the original Sprite LFS code (still available for > download, with a reasonable license) and wondering if many of the design > decisions made in rewriting it for 4.4BSD were actually as valid as CSRG > thought. I think the largest architectural changes could be summarized as: > > * Move the cleaner out of the kernel (I have long thought this was a bad > idea for security reasons, and it sounds like you have concluded it is > also a bad idea for concurrency/correctness reasons) > > * Move inodes and the ifile "into the log" instead of just keeping them > at the front of the disk. It sounds like you are now concluding this > decision was bad too, at least as originally implemented. > > * Share various on-disk and in-memory structures with the FFS code. We > now have lots of filesystems that don't, so I'm not sure how much of > an advantage this is, really, and I think there are ways it complicates > FFS, not for the better. > > This leaves me wondering whether, given the scope and complexity of what > it sounds like you're thinking of diving into to fix BSD LFS some more, > and the likelihood of breaking backwards compatibility with older BSD LFS > filesystems, it might make more sense to start over with the code from > Sprite.
I have tried to make use of LFS over the years without any success. The last attempt was with a 9.x pkgsrc build environment where WRKOBJDIR pointed to a LFS filesystem. This would have probably been on a amd64 system type, but might have been a earmv6hf or earmv7hf environment (don't remember). Although it was better then in the past, the environment hung up pretty quickly. When it functioned, it was quite fast, and made a good WRKOBJDIR destination in that respect, but wasn't at all stable. Has anyone actually tried to use (and I mean that it the non trivial sense) LFS lately and actually had it not lock the system up?? -- Brad Spencer - b...@anduin.eldar.org
