Google Is Still Striving To Upstream Incremental FS In Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Is Still Striving To Upstream Incremental FS In Linux

After originally publishing the Incremental FS patches back in May of 2019, Google's Android kernel team is still working to upstream this virtual file-system into the mainline Linux kernel and at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was working to drum up support for it...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-2020-Incremental-FS

[eydee]

Why is it always Google? I wanna see DuckDuckGo start contributing, so we can praise them too.

[Palu Macil]

Why is it always Google? I wanna see DuckDuckGo start contributing, so we can praise them too.

Google has 114,096 employees and DuckDuckGo has 100. I'm not sure how many developers each have, but I would be willing to place a small bet on them not having the capacity to donate a lot of dev time to the Linux kernel.

[Vistaus]

Google has 114,096 employees and DuckDuckGo has 100. I'm not sure how many developers each have, but I would be willing to place a small bet on them not having the capacity to donate a lot of dev time to the Linux kernel.

And you think all of those 144,096 Google employees work on the Linux kernel? Their Linux team is very small as well (unless you want to count ChromeOS and Android employees as well).

[ssokolow]

And you think all of those 144,096 Google employees work on the Linux kernel? Their Linux team is very small as well (unless you want to count ChromeOS and Android employees as well).

The point is that DuckDuckGo doesn't really have the money to have a Linux team while Google does.

[skeevy420]

And you think all of those 144,096 Google employees work on the Linux kernel? Their Linux team is very small as well (unless you want to count ChromeOS and Android employees as well).

Incremental FS requires a regular file-system underneath but was engineered by Google as their means of allowing larger Android applications/games to start-up while binaries/resources are still being downloaded/transferred to the device.

Seeing as how this Linux patch is likely coming from their Android team since it is being developed for Android, yes, most of us here do count their Android and ChromeOS teams in regards to stuff Google gets upstreamed to the Linux kernel. Android and ChromeOS really aren't that much different than Fedora Silverblue and other immutable root Linux distributions on a technical level, they just use different centralized app stores, update/upgrade methods for the root and kernel, and graphical environments.

[muncrief]

Wow.

This seems like an incredibly complicated solution, prone to myriads of problems and errors, to solve a minor annoyance.

I can't help but think that, depending upon the actual file download speed and fragments received, that all of these special tracking and deferment operations could quickly evolve into an incalculable mess, with a high likelihood of extensive delays and even lockups.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I think it's impossible. Just that it's so complex and rife with unforeseen scenarios that it seems it would take a very long time to actually be proved stable and reliable.

In fact by the time it was Internet speeds might be so fast that the whole point of the exercise could be moot.

[Guest]

Wow.

This seems like an incredibly complicated solution, prone to myriads of problems and errors, to solve a minor annoyance.

I can't help but think that, depending upon the actual file download speed and fragments received, that all of these special tracking and deferment operations could quickly evolve into an incalculable mess, with a high likelihood of extensive delays and even lockups.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I think it's impossible. Just that it's so complex and rife with unforeseen scenarios that it seems it would take a very long time to actually be proved stable and reliable.

In fact by the time it was Internet speeds might be so fast that the whole point of the exercise could be moot.

Well I think they might already have it working in production. They've done a lot of work recently on dynamic loading of modules in Android apps, mainly for games.

They can handle the potential hiccups, by just displaying a loading screen, and having background thread wait on the data to be downloaded.

[muncrief]

Well I think they might already have it working in production. They've done a lot of work recently on dynamic loading of modules in Android apps, mainly for games.

They can handle the potential hiccups, by just displaying a loading screen, and having background thread wait on the data to be downloaded.

As I said, I don't think its impossible, just an incredibly complicated and error prone solution to, what I would consider, a minor annoyance.

But hey, I could be wrong.

Even though I've only been wrong once in my 60+ years, and that was when I once thought I was wrong, but wasn't

Oh wait ... never mind

[Guest]

As I said, I don't think its impossible, just an incredibly complicated and error prone solution to, what I would consider, a minor annoyance.

But hey, I could be wrong.

Even though I've only been wrong once in my 60+ years, and that was when I once thought I was wrong, but wasn't

Oh wait ... never mind

It's not just a minor annoyance. Consider a game like Final Fantasy with multiple chapters. In that case, instead of having to download an entire 500 MB game, you could download the first chapter and base game files, say 60 MB and then download successive chapters in the background as needed.

There are many other reasons for a feature like this.