Messages in this thread | | | From | Alexander Zarochentsev <> | Subject | Re: reiser4 plugins | Date | Mon, 27 Jun 2005 13:30:06 +0400 |
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On Sunday 26 June 2005 21:02, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 04:08:49AM -0500, David Masover wrote: > > I've been reading a bit of history, and the reason Linux got so popular > > in the first place was the tendency to include stuff that worked and > > provided a feature people wanted, even if it was ugly. The philosophy > > would be: choose a good implementation over an ugly one, but choose an > > ugly one over nothing at all. > > And things change over time. Back in those days the linux codebase was > small and it was easy to change things all over the place. These times > our codebase is huge, and people that know enough parts of the kernel to > do big changes are overloaded with work. Thus we have to set our > acceptance criteria a lot higher now - else we'd be totally lost with > the current size of the project already. > > > > We have to maintain said ugly code for decades. Maintainability is a > > > big deal when you deal with the timeframes we deal with. > > > > Maintainability is like optimization. The maintainability of a > > non-working program is irrelevant. You'd be right if we already had > > plugins-in-the-VFS. We don't. The most maintainable solution for > > plugins-in-the-FS that actually exists is Reiser4, exactly as it is now > > - -- because it is the _only_ one that actually exists right now. > > We do have plugins in the VFS, every filesystem is a set of a few of them > and some gluecode. > > <skipping a lot stuff> > > David and Hans, I've read through my backlog a lot now, and I must say > it's pretty pointless - you're discussing lots of highlevel what if and > don't actually care about something as boring as actual technical details. > > Hans has lots of very skillfull technical people like zam and vs, and maybe > he should give them some freedom to sort out technical issues for a basic > reiser4 merge, and one that is done we can turn back to discussion of > advanced features and their implementation, hopefully with a few more > arguments on both sides and a real technical discussion.
Unfortunately, this is not only a technical discussion... it is about linux development model too.
Well, about the plugins. We can clean reiser4<->VFS interface up by setting per-vfs-object inode/dentry/super ops instead using of our own dispatcher. So different reiser4 inodes/files will have different i_ops/f_ops. That would be only visible-in-VFS part of reiser4 object plugins.
Would the help to solve "reiser4 plugins" question? It is just as other FS do -- procfs has seq_file and sysconfig interfaces below the VFS and l-k people do not complain each day about layering violation ;-) Procfs is taken as an example because it deals with objects of different types, actually anybody may create own procfs objects more or less general way.
I don't belive that you want to see all reiser4-specific things as item plugins, disk format plugins in the VFS.
Thanks, Alex.
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