Learn More About Lennart Poettering's casync Project

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Learn More About Lennart Poettering's casync Project

Last month Lennart Poettering of systemd and PulseAudio fame introduced his newest project, casync. The goal of casync is for distributing file-system images and is inspired by rsync and Git...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=casync-video

[bregma]

It's good to notice a trend early. This time he's reinventing IPFS, which implies there is a real and persistent demand for that functionality.

[jrch2k8]

It's good to notice a trend early. This time he's reinventing IPFS, which implies there is a real and persistent demand for that functionality.

Is not exactly reinventing ipfs but more like taking the core idea from it, either way I'm extremely excited and love to use it once it get the corner cases cleaned up.

Of course this probably won't be that hot for desktop users since you have extra power around to use more complex tools to achieve the same but for those of us that actually have to deliver functioning systems on ARM/MIPS that need to be update regularly this could be extremely ground breaking, a true godsend.

If this tool allows you to generate easy system wide bin-diffs of a SD/EMMC and can be integrated in a early enough systemd boot stage later on, this could finally allow cost efficient firmware update delivery for IoT without an army of developers, of course this means some smart thinking is needed on the developers side to split boot-kernel-system-data-casync to avoid any pitfall but that still will be 500 times better than the current methods.

This could also be huge on the server world where you can test to death a very specific software set and then simply deliver it to the productions servers, restart and voila (repeat as necessary in the future)

[pheldens]

ipfs / bittorrent sync fucntionality would be great, if he can pull it off, I recommend to keep it simple (at first)

[Ardje]

Why does it sound so similar to csync(2). Ah, because there is one letter extra.

[Ardje]

Ok, it would actually be nice if that worked on linux, mac and windows as a distribution mechanism for steam updates...
Rollback to a previous version of the game... done. Distibuting a new update of a 100GB game with minor updates, done.

[starshipeleven]

It's good to notice a trend early. This time he's reinventing IPFS, which implies there is a real and persistent demand for that functionality.

Does IPFS allow to deal with atomic filesystem image updates on embedded stuff?

[starshipeleven]

Ok, it would actually be nice if that worked on linux, mac and windows as a distribution mechanism for steam updates...
Rollback to a previous version of the game... done. Distibuting a new update of a 100GB game with minor updates, done.

It depends from how the "minor updates" are. If the game is using big blobs for assets (compressed and encrypted archives) like most games, then any little change means the whole blob is different, and casync approach fails.

I've seen games using archives whose contents override the same files contained inside older archives. So the dev just pushes out a new small archive that will then be loaded last and its content will override the stuff from older ones.

But given the modern way of game development (game broken as hell on release, send multi-GB patches every few month for a year or more) that kind of approach might not be the best for disk usage.

[pal666]

This time he's reinventing IPFS

lol, why not scp? it has exactly same amount of similarity

[waxhead]

Why do someone (everyone?) have to hate Lennart by default. Sure systemd have caused a lot of controversy, but this is something entirely different. Just because the dude looks smug, acts smug and behaves smug does not mean that all of his ideas are bad. I actually watched the entire talk (and I payed attention most of the time as well). casync appears to be a nice little tool for it's intended use. It appears to be simpler than tar+rsync for larger sets, and I think it could be a real bandwidth saver