Re: patent on O_ATOMICLOOKUP [Re: [PATCH] loopable tmpfs (2.4.17)]

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Sun, May 26, 2002 at 04:17:07PM -0400, Alexander Viro wrote:
> > Sniffle, whimper.  It is clearly different in that it calls out to the
> > BSD allocation policy, which is completely different.
> 
> Um...  In 4.2 - more or less so.  In 4.4 - way more than that:
> 	* ffs_bmap() is not doing any allocations now
> 	* ffs_balloc() does (and is an analog of old bmap()) and it contains

I think I was looking at 4.3Tahoe, but it doesn't matter, what I was 
thinking about was your comment about frags, that makes things quite 
different.  And I know, err, am pretty sure, that by this point Kirk
had worked over the allocation policy to keep things in the same
cylinder group when possible and I don't think that the original
file system was quite as careful.

> 	WTF?  4BSD code is out there, in SCCS, no less.  Goes back
> to 1982 or so.  It's not that checking it would be a problem - grab
> the 4th CD from Kirk's 4-parter (CSRG archives) and see yourself.

Yup, got it.  I've had some fun in there.

> 	BTW, having _that_ converted to BK might be an interesting thing.
> To do that one would need to take file moves into account, but they'd
> got enough snapshots of the tree to reconstruct that...

Yes, I know, it's on my list of things to do.  There are some compat issues,
it isn't a trivial thing, but we can and will do it.  Another thing I plan
to do is to build up BK repositories of all the BSD docs as well as all the
troff docs.  I really like troff, I'm not a fan of latex or word, troff 
still works better for me but I think many people abandoned it out of a 
lack of documentation.  And when that's done, I'll make man page versions
of all the stupid info stuff so I can say "man whatever" and get what 
I need.

Wandering well into the weeds....
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Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm