I thought I'd posted this a week or go aso when the file system
discussion was up. But of course I neglected to reply to the newsgroup,
in typical fashion. Well done! So here,
Repeated from the end:
A CHALLENGE:
What upcoming technology/code will prove the most influencial and
innovative to the linux platform?
David Zakar wrote:
> Someone actually did a performance comparison a while back, and found
> that ext3 performed pretty well compared to all of the special
> "high-performance" file systems. My guess is that keeping your hard
> drive < 95% full is more important to performance than anything else.
>
> ext3's always worked great for me, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
> You aren't going to see any amazing gains from alternative file systems,
> to be sure.
My general understanding is that the actual ext3 code is hideous, ugly
and should be avoided at all costs. That being said, it miraculously
appears on of the most stable & crash resillient. Its performance is
also not nearly as bad as reputed. Its latency is allegedly better than
Reiser in some cases, although its throughput almost universally slower.
Ext3 also sync's fairly fast, every 5 seconds. You can safely scale
this down to 15 (commit=15) or so and save some performance. You might
loose more data (16 seconds worth) in a crash.
I do however prefer Reiser. I am _massively_ excited about Reiser4, I
pray the plugin model is 1/4 what I dream. Some day I'll have to
download the source, esp. seeing as how that is the only documentation
at all on Reiser4 and its plugin model. Talk about shitty PR.
I seriously hope Reiser4 makes it into the kernel as Hans' wants. The
kernel people dont like the idea of allowing a competing non-POSIX FS
api into the kernel, they feel like its stomping on their toes. And
they've always been anti-userland. Personally I feel like its hubris,
they dont want to detract from the mighty Linux kernel. Wahta bunch of
BS. Frankly Linux has stopped innovating. We're not going to loose the
desktop because Gnome isnt pretty enough, we're going to loose the
desktop because everyone's working on making Gnome pretty and has
neglected to actually innovate and generate new concepts. Reiser4 will
allow entirely new metaphors for how data is accessed. It will be the
heart which pumps new innovating into the linux world, the marrow from
which it spreads. Innovation is how linux will win, not pretty desktops.
A CHALLENGE:
What technology will prove the most influencial and innovative to the
linux platform?
I think we know where my vote is
Myren
