Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives

James Bruce
2004-09-02T12:55:00Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:

>...
>But _my_ point is, no user program is going to take _advantage_ of
>anything that only one filesystem on one system offers.
>
>So there's no point.
>
>It's much saner (from _any_ app standpoint) to roll their own database in
>user space - that way it just works.
>
>In other words, nobody is really ever going to take advantage of this.
>This is _not_ how technical advanncement happens. The way you get people
>to take advantage of something is to have a nice gradual ramp-up, not a
>sudden new feature that they can't realistically use.
>...
>

Sure, but there are plenty of existing interfaces that you could
emulate. One could make a small library to use a transactional
filesystem to implement the Berkely DB interface (libdb) for example.
So on filesystems without such support your app could use the regular
userspace database, but on a transactional filesystem it'd just use
regular files, which would simplify database management and likely
increase performance over the userspace-only version (libdb is pretty
slow). In terms of functionality it'd just be a drop-in replacement,
just like math libraries that use MMX/SSE when available.

- Jim Bruce