On Thu, 20 May 1999, Eric S. Hvozda wrote:

> Is LFS ready for prime time?

as opposed to, a single-architecture in-house corporate JFS implementation
written for a highly-customized version SVR4 offered under hazy licensing
terms and proposed for integration into the BSD-licensed kernel?

Given that Linus was the man who ``blessed'' Slovansen's sound drivers,
let Ledford's ``egregarious'' aic7xxx hacks into the so-called stable
kernel, and agreed with the idea of a ``Network Block Device Driver,''
this XFS thing has the potential to be very, very amusing. 

Remember, we're talking about the UNIX that threw out a general-purpose
message-passing kernel-to-userland interface for the stated purpose of
making an include file 40% shorter and modularizing UNIX-domain sockets.
Include-file-bloat is indeed a major performance problem, and UNIX sockets
use almost 10k of kernel memory.  Who uses UNIX sockets, anyway? X?
syslogd? Best that the 10k be freed.


My favorite quite from the press release:

 ``Without a journaling file system, rebooting a computer after a crash
   can be extremely time-consuming, a critical issue as companies look for
   computer systems that are available to users around the clock.''

As someone who's seen what ext2fs does to the filesystem on a dying disk,
I'd just like to take a moment of everyone's time to announce my gratitude
to the Linux community, on behalf of myself and my users:  ``hear, hear!
What High Availability really needs is shorter fsck times!  I'm tired of
tweaking rc on my Status to skip fsck.  fsck should be a kernel module.  
All hail, Linux XFS.  Assemble a team.  Work on fsckmod will begin
immediately.''

On 20 May 1999, Oleg Polyanski wrote:

> lfs is an example of excellent research work but in real life it is
> unusable.

since it is research, I think the correct term in this case is
``unfinished.''  In any case, it can't possibly be worse than the VxFS in
HPUX 10.20.

If it's not clear, I'll take the Pepsi Challenge with that XFS stuff any
day.  If just one company would turn the license fees for 5 copies of Irix
into an LFS research grant, I bet we'd be through this small mess.

sick of white papers,
-- 
Miles Nordin / 1-888-857-2723
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700