Re: Atomic filesystem or not

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

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Hans Reiser wrote:
| David Masover wrote:
|
|>
|> doing atomic operations -- because a system call named "reiser4"
|
|
| Maybe I should call it sys_reiser and not sys_reiser4? ;-) What about
| the name is not portable? ;-)

Um.  Suppose someone wanted to duplicate it on (say) ext3?  Then the
name sys_reiser becomes confusing.

But I bet your system call does more than just define atoms, right?  Or
it's supposed to?

Is there an advantage to having one system call, instead of many?
(sys_begin_atom, sys_end_atom, sys_keyword_search, and so on...)

If so, you either want to try to turn it into a standard (so all new
filesystems will have a sys_reiser call) or create a library to abstract
the system call away (something like atom_new, atom_end, and so on).  In
fact, if I'm not mistaken, the "atomic" features could even be
implemented entirely as a userland library on top of the filesystem, at
least as long as the power is on ;)

I like your way better, but I also like the idea of making those
features so widespread (even poorly implemented) that programs start
adopting them.

No matter how good reiser4 is, I don't think everyone will start using
it overnight.  And its atomicity means very little to the average user
if it isn't ubiquitous.  I want cp, vim, thunderbird, and so on to all
support reiser4-style atoms.  If they can do that without a reformat for
existing users/developers, it's more likely to happen in such mainstream
apps, and it helps make reiser4 more useful.




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