Re: A bold idea (Re: Carrying Attributes too Far)

[David Masover <jedi@ninja.dynup.net>]

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>If you want to have a flexible size for a filesystem, the are
>possiblities with LVM (or others) which gives you also the possibility
>to create a raid - which you normally want on such filesystems.
>Hardlinks between different partitions gives another problem: What is,
>if the other partition is not available (unmounted or crashed)? What is,
>if the other partition is an NFS-mounted partition with all the
>possiblities that can happen?
> 
>  
>
That's why I don't think there should be hardlinks across devices.  You 
can put a filesystem on a RAID, of course.  LVM is not really a 
solution, for several reasons.  For example, it seems as though it's 
actually possible to have an entire partition fragmented in the same way 
that a single file can be, and there's no way to fix that.

It also requires the user to change things.

Now, why would I use separate filesystems in the first place?  Two 
reasons:  performance and security.  Right now, it's a lot easier to 
have /var be a certain sized partition rather than trying to enforce 
disk quotas.  It also improves performance if we know that quickly 
moving data like that in /tmp is separated from slowly moving data like 
that in /usr.  However, I think both of these problems could be solved 
to the point where an intelligent filesystem would beat an intelligent 
admin on partitioning any time.
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