Torvalds: User-Space File-Systems, Toys, Misguided People

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Torvalds: User-Space File-Systems, Toys, Misguided People

Yesterday I mentioned what Anton Altaparmakov of Tuxera had recently said about their NTFS kernel driver being the fastest Linux file-system, which erupted into a large debate in our forums. Within that mailing list thread was also another interesting comment by Linus Torvalds. "Userspace filesystem? The problem is right there. Always has been. People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided."..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTYwMA

[bachinchi]

...become morons

[down1]

Speaking of FUSE, using the default NTFS in ubuntu I find the IO buffer (using "free") grows larger than a GB. Is this normal?

[kraftman]

...become morons

By morons do you mean people who don't want to run the root partition using FUSE?

[bachinchi]

By morons do you mean people who don't want to run the root partition using FUSE?

I meant Linus, sometimes he's just a dick.

[elanthis]

I meant Linus, sometimes he's just a dick.

Nothing wrong with being a dick. Keeps you honest.

Being a dick about something you're outright wrong about is another story. Sometimes Linus falls into that category. I'm not sure about this case. I'm still not really with him on the anti-micro-kernel thing, since it seems that the big two competing OSes are at least partially micro-kernels (OS X and WinNT) and perform just fine to get stuff done for the regular folk thank you very much. Also, Win7 crashes less than Linux. (Seriously. If your DRM driver in Linux crashes, your system is hosed. If your WDDM driver in Windows crashes, it just restarts, and even quite a few apps that use D3D directly can recover from that restart without a hitch. It's pretty awesome. I get waaaay more kernel oopses from Linux than I get blue screens from Windows... and I very very rarely get a Linux kernel oops.)

[schmidtbag]

Nothing wrong with being a dick. Keeps you honest.

Being a dick about something you're outright wrong about is another story. Sometimes Linus falls into that category. I'm not sure about this case. I'm still not really with him on the anti-micro-kernel thing, since it seems that the big two competing OSes are at least partially micro-kernels (OS X and WinNT) and perform just fine to get stuff done for the regular folk thank you very much. Also, Win7 crashes less than Linux. (Seriously. If your DRM driver in Linux crashes, your system is hosed. If your WDDM driver in Windows crashes, it just restarts, and even quite a few apps that use D3D directly can recover from that restart without a hitch. It's pretty awesome. I get waaaay more kernel oopses from Linux than I get blue screens from Windows... and I very very rarely get a Linux kernel oops.)

I wouldn't say linus was being a "dick" about this situation, just blunt. i wouldn't blame him for the way he responded, because Anton was acting all pompous about something without much explanation or proof of how his product worked.

Windows 7 not crashing for you is probably just coincidental, as is Linux crashing on you. Win 7 is definitely the most stable GUI OS made by MS, but I've found it crashed on me several times before, and I don't use it for anything except gaming and virtualization (and no, it hasn't crashed during a game or virtualizing). Linux only crashes on me when a program I develop goes wrong, overclocking too much, or faulty drivers.

I blame crashing mostly on the user's decisions and the hardware. There are so many variables that affects the stability of an OS, so unless an OS is specific to an entire system (for example iOS for iphone), defining the stability of an OS is somewhat pointless. I've heard of people who have never had a blue screen with Vista or even windows ME and we all know how supposedly unstable those were. I've heard of people who had a fresh install of Linux crash on them when doing nothing.

The best way to define the stability of an OS is how it operates on the average machine. I would definitely consider Windows 7 stable, but not more so than Linux.

[smitty3268]

I'm still not really with him on the anti-micro-kernel thing, since it seems that the big two competing OSes are at least partially micro-kernels (OS X and WinNT) and perform just fine to get stuff done for the regular folk thank you very much.

Can you explain how either of those kernels are more micro-kernel than Linux is? I think all 3 of them are properly classified as hybrid kernels, and all are pretty similarly designed.

Also, Win7 crashes less than Linux. (Seriously. If your DRM driver in Linux crashes, your system is hosed. If your WDDM driver in Windows crashes, it just restarts, and even quite a few apps that use D3D directly can recover from that restart without a hitch. It's pretty awesome. I get waaaay more kernel oopses from Linux than I get blue screens from Windows... and I very very rarely get a Linux kernel oops.)

I used to have a similar experience, but then I updated my ATI drivers. Now I get a hard crash every time i try to watch h.264 video, because it tries to do acceleration on my card and fails. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to turn this "feature" off, at least not that i'm aware of. So while some driver crashes can be caught and the driver restarted (i think that happens when the userspace portion of the driver fails) it definitely doesn't always happen that way.

[kraftman]

Also, Win7 crashes less than Linux. (Seriously. If your DRM driver in Linux crashes, your system is hosed. If your WDDM driver in Windows crashes, it just restarts, and even quite a few apps that use D3D directly can recover from that restart without a hitch. It's pretty awesome. I get waaaay more kernel oopses from Linux than I get blue screens from Windows... and I very very rarely get a Linux kernel oops.)

Oops isn't something which forces you to hit the reset button afaik. Keep in mind there are Linux distributions which don't ship the latest X bits.

[movieman]

If your WDDM driver in Windows crashes, it just restarts, and even quite a few apps that use D3D directly can recover from that restart without a hitch. It's pretty awesome.

Maybe, but it has to do that because I see far more video driver crashes in Windows than in Linux. Same machine, both operating systems using proprietary drivers from Nvidia, and I spend about 10x as much time running Linux on it than Windows.

While it may be awesome, fixing the regular crashes would seem like a better idea than trying to work around them in this way.