Offtopic to: LogFS merge

David Collier-Brown
2008-05-03T18:01:59Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The real issue for me wrt a filesystem is the on-disk layout.
>
> If we know that on-disk structures need change, we shouldn't merge it. It
> doesn't matter if that can be worked around with some backwards-
> compatibiltiy flag: we should simply not encourage that kind of behaviour.

I agree in particular, but not in principle (;-))

Changing the filesystem format was something that happened at
least twice on Multics, on production machines. I happened to be
on during one of the changes and didn't even know it was happening
until there was a broadcast message warning of poor performance.

I always thought that was cool, and got permission recently to
post a colleague's paper on it at http://www.multicians.org/stachour.html

It would be cool if data could change at run-time on Linux, just
like security-sensitive code.

--dave
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David Collier-Brown | Always do right. This will gratify
Sun Microsystems, Toronto | some people and astonish the rest
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