Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: kernel support for non-english user messages | From | Shaya Potter <> | Date | 11 Apr 2003 00:23:16 -0400 |
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yes, yes. I of course agree, just saying that if someone really wanted to do it, banging out a skeleton solution that can be filled in shouldn't be "that" hard. Getting it "right"(tm) would be tougher, but I think doable. The reason I think no one has done it, is because no one is really that interested.
On Fri, 2003-04-11 at 00:19, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 18:20:15 EDT, Shaya Potter said: > > On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 16:36, John Bradford wrote: > > > > There is a lot of anti-VMS stuff in the Unix world mostly coming > > > > from the _horrible_ command line and other bad early memories. There > > > > is also a hell of a lot of really cool stuff under that command line > > > > we could and should learn from. > > > > > > When are we going to see versioned filesystems in Linux? That was a > > > standard feature in VMS. > > > > it shouldn't be that hard, it was one of the 6 OS projects for the > > regular 4000 level (senior/grad) level OS class here at columbia last > > semster. > > > > The assignment was to modify ext2 to support versioning, basically means > > making a copy of it within ext2's open, if it's opened O_RDWR. The > > assignment was a little bit more complicated in that we took an ext2 > > flag bit to mean "version", so that a file would only be versioned if > > the bit was set, as well as only allowing a single level of versioning, > > though extending it w/ more wouldn't be that hard. > > > > The student solutions (as well as our sample solution) weren't that > > "pretty", but then again, each project was only for 2-2.5 weeks. > > The problem is, as usual, in the details that almost never get handled in 2-week > student projects. Some off the top of my head: > > 1) What happens when *multiple* programs have a file open at the same time? > If you only handle one level of versioning, somebody is going to lose. Handling > multiple levels is of course more "fun". And you get to worry about race > conditions - does your code DTRT if multiple processes do an open() on alternate > CPUs at the same time. Does it DTRT if a process open()s a file, and then fork()s, > and both parent and child start scribbling on the file descriptor? > > 2) For that matter, should new versions be created at open() or at the first write()? > Doing it at write() allows not creating a new version if no changes have > actually happened - but this has its own issues. > > 3) Version a 500 megabyte file. Change one block. Do it a few more times. > Are you better off copying the whole file (which bloats your disk usage and > kills your I/O bandwidth), or keeping deltas (the list of allocated blocks could be > almost identical except for the replaced/rewritten blocks). However, this DOES > make doing an fsck() a *lot* more interesting - is a block allocated to multiple > files in error or not? > > 4) What happens if you rename() a file? Can you open() a previous version for > writing? If so, does it get versioned? How does a backup program restore a > previous version? > > 5) Let's say we use VMS-style filenames to version. foo, foo;2, foo;3, etc. > Now, is open("foo;2",...) a reference to the previous version of foo or to a new > file that happens to be called foo;2? What happens if some other file happens > to be called foo;2 and you create a version of foo? > > 6) OK, since anything besides \0 and / is legal in a filename, we can't use ;N to > version. Let's steal another field in the inode to do the counting. Now how does > userspace reference a previous version easily? Can you get into a situation where > different versions of a file have different owners/permissions? > > 7) Userspace support. Anybody want to open that can and take up worm farming? ;) > > 8) User support issues. See (7). ;) > > That's just the first 10 minutes or so of thinking about things that could be problems > that a student project won't address. > > Yes, VMS had to worry about a lot of these issues too - but VMS had the advantage that > versioning was designed into the environment from very early on, and wasn't a retrofit > as it would be for Linux. So they could make arbitrary rules like "If there's a > ;nnn on the end of a filename, it's a version" without having to worry about breaking > anything.
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