Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Pavel Machek
2004-08-31T20:32:26Z

Hi!

> > You do need extra tools anyway, placing them in the kernel is cheating (and
> > absolutely pointless, IMHO).
>
> I agree.
>
> There's no point to having the kernel export information that is already
> inherent in the main stream.
>
> I've seen all these examples of exposing MP3 ID information as a "side
> stream", and that's TOTALLY POINTLESS! The information is already there,
> it's in a standard format, and exporting it as a stream buys you
> absolutely nothing.

It buys me caching. I do quite often

bzcat patch.2.6.8.bz2 | less (read the patch)
(sometimes repeat that few times because I hit ^c when I should not
have etc).
cd ...clean; bzcat patch.2.6.8.bz2 | patch -Esp1
cd ...linux; bzcat patch.2.6.8.bz2 | patch -Esp1

Now... that's total waste of cpu. bzip2 decompression takes quite some
time.

I could do

bzcat patch.2.6.8.bz2 > /tmp/delete.me.when.you.are.done

...but I'd probably forget to delete that one and anyway, it requires
me to think about it. Nicest way would be

cat patch.2.6.8.bz2/ubz | less
cd ...clean; cat patch.2.6.8.bz2/ubz | patch -Esp1
cd ...linux; cat patch.2.6.8.bz2/ubz | patch -Esp1

with kernel intelligently caching uncompressed data. I believe this
can not be done completely in userspace.
Pavel
--
People were complaining that M$ turns users into beta-testers...
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