Re: [ANNOUNCE] DualFS: File System with Meta-data and Data Separation

From: Juan Piernas Canovas
Date: Thu Feb 15 2007 - 18:02:25 EST


Hi Jörn,

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, [utf-8] Jörn Engel wrote:

On Thu, 15 February 2007 19:38:14 +0100, Juan Piernas Canovas wrote:

The patch for 2.6.11 is not still stable enough to be released. Be patient
;-)

While I don't want to discourage you, this is about the point in
development where most log structured filesystems stopped. Doing a
little web research, you will notice those todo-lists with "cleaner"
being the top item for...years!

Getting that one to work robustly is _very_ hard work and just today
I've noticed that mine was not as robust as I would have liked to think.
Also, you may note that by updating to newer kernels, the VM writeout
policies can change and impact your cleaner. To an extent even that you
had a rock-solid filesystem with 2.6.18 and thing crumble between your
fingers in 2.6.19 or later.

If the latter happens, most likely the VM is not to blame, it just
proved that your cleaner is still getting some corner-cases wrong and
needs more work. There goes another week of debugging. :(

Jörn

Actually, the version of DualFS for Linux 2.4.19 implements a cleaner. In our case, the cleaner is not really a problem because there is not too much to clean (the meta-data device only contains meta-data blocks which are 5-6% of the file system blocks; you do not have to move data blocks).

Anyway, thank you for warning me ;-)

Regards,

Juan.

--
D. Juan Piernas Cánovas
Departamento de Ingeniería y Tecnología de Computadores
Facultad de Informática. Universidad de Murcia
Campus de Espinardo - 30080 Murcia (SPAIN)
Tel.: +34968367657 Fax: +34968364151
email: piernas@xxxxxxxxxxx
PGP public key:
http://pgp.rediris.es:11371/pks/lookup?search=piernas%40ditec.um.es&op=index

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