Re: NFSv4/pNFS possible POSIX I/O API standards

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 09:44:08PM -0700, Gary Grider wrote:
> The one use that some users talk about is just knowing the file is 
> growing is important  and useful to them,
> knowing exactly to the byte how much growth seems less important to 
> them until they close.
> On these big parallel apps, so many things can happen that can just 
> hang.  They often use
> the presence of checkpoint files and how big they are to gage 
> progress of he application.
> Of course there are other ways this can be accomplished but they do 
> this sort of thing
> a lot.  That is the main case I have heard that might benefit from 
> "possibly-inaccurate" values.
> Of course it assumes that the inaccuracy is just old information and 
> not bogus information.

There are better ways to do it but we refuse to do it right is hardly
an option to add kernel bloat..

> Thanks, we will put out a complete version of what we have in a 
> document to the Open Group
> site in a week or two so all the pages in their current state are 
> available.  We could then
> begin some iteration on all these comments we have gotten from the 
> various communities.

Could you please stop putting out specs until you actually have working
code?  There's absolutely no point in standardizing things until it's
actually used in practice.