[ale] Ext4 adoption anyone?

Pat Regan thehead at patshead.com
Thu Jan 22 21:41:39 EST 2009


Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> Yes, but the disk format is unstable as of -rc2.  It's marked as highly
> experimental.  I attempted (and failed) with -rc1 to use it on my extra
> hard drive; it would not mount.  I'll be trying again with -rc2 or -rc3
> here soon (-rc3 will be coming out soon).

The goal was a stable disk format by the end of 2008, and they missed
that.  Not by a whole lot so far, at least.

> The config option under filesystems currently reads:
> 
> <*> Btrfs filesystem (EXPERIMENTAL) Unstable disk format
> 
> I'd like to see them do with filesystems like they did with device
> drivers, and add a "staging" option to the filesystem driver selection
> menu, but I don't know if they're going to do that or not.

I doubt we'll get a subheading like that for filesystems.  It sounds
like they really don't want to have any experimental filesystems in the
tree, if they can manage it.

> Yeah, ZFS is pretty memory-intensive all on its own.  I am pretty sure
> that its target is dedicated file servers.  :)

It is, but I'm pretty sure that with zfs-fuse it was even doubling up on
disk cache.  The kernel cached everything, and then the zfs library did
its own caching on top of that.

> Indeed.  I am starting to see Torvalds' backup method as becoming
> practical---keep everything important on the Internet so that you can
> easily restore what you're doing.  This doesn't work for the file
> server that I have since it has music and photos, but it works pretty
> well for everything else that I do.

My files aren't popular enough for the Torvalds method.  I have only 3
directories that I backup very regularly.  My repositories, my working
directory, and my documents directory.  Oh, and a handful of dot-files
(even though the important dirs, like .emacs.d and .sawfish, are in
repositories).

I just rsync these to a host on the internet, but I manually dump them
to a flash drive just in case.  I love flash.  It is terribly durable.

I have WAY too many DVDs, even very good media, that I just can't read
anymore.

> I know that bzr---at least when it started out---was pretty slow.
> These days it's great with speed, at least in all the cases that I use
> it for.  I don't pull the MySQL tree with it, but then again I don't
> use the MySQL database server.  :-P

I have an SVN tree that I keep synced up with the tree of a Quake 3
based game.  Most of my usual commands are pretty much instantaneous.
Some take a few seconds.

> bzr will look at trees and merge them based on their common ancestor.
> There are constant improvements being made to bzr all the time; when I
> started using it, it was a 0.1x release, and today they're at 1.11,
> with active development still continuing.  The only thing I wish they
> would have done is used a compiled language, but I think that once
> development tapers off a bit, it will probably be independently ported
> to C.  That said, though, for a Python program, it's ridiculously fast,
> at least IMHO.  I've pretty well always been unhappy with software
> written in Python, in terms of its speed and memory usage; bzr has
> begun to change my perceptions of what a Python program can be and
> shown that Python can be used for "serious" software, as opposed to the
> simple one-off scripts that I tend to use it for.

I have no fear of interpreted languages.  Perl and Python are both good
at text processing, which is what version control is all about.

> I still wouldn't consider using it for a major software project, but
> that's just me.  bzr is probably the only piece of complete software
> that I use which relies upon Python, that isn't some form of "glue".
> Also, its integration with Launchpad is wonderful, and the abillity to
> push to private locations that I hold on the Internet is priceless.  I
> imagine that Darcs probably has some way to do the same thing, pushing
> to a machine over SSH that doesn't already have a Darcs installation,
> because most DVCS tools seem to have that ability.  It's very nice, and
> a wonderfully welcome "wishlist item" from the days of Subversion.

At the time I started using it, Darcs required a Darcs install on the
remove machine to push.  That has never been an issue for me.  I
wouldn't be surprised if that isn't a requirement now.  Pulling
definitely works over http, but I've never set up a public repository
like that.

The only bad thing I ever hear anyone say about Darcs is that it is
"slow" for some definition of slow.  The biggest repository I work with
is about 500 files in 16 meg.  I imagine it might very well be slow if
you shoot way, way past that point.  I'm also pretty sure that most of
the people complaining about the speed will never have a repository big
enough to be slow.

Pat

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