> Quite frankly, nobody has EVER given me a reason that makes any kind of
> sense at all for supporting raw devices in any other way than we already
> do. Nobody sane uses a disk without a filesystem, and the insane people
> that do I feel we can and should ignore. Insanity has a way of dying off
> over time, when Darvin starts to look into it.
Linus, the point is that there _are_ applications out there which do use raw
devices on other Unix variants, like Oracle, Sybase, etc. If I go to a
customer and want to sell a Linux solution, and Oracle told him "well we do
support Linux but it's suboptimal compared to HP, Sun because we can't use
raw devices" who is going to tell the customer he is in good hands? Is it
you? Or are you going to tell the customer what is good for him? Just like
IBM did in the past (and sometimes, still today?) This is arrogant.
There is more to selling Unix than just technical issues.
But there _is_ another technical issue nobody mentioned so far in this
thread. Using e.g. Oracle on raw devices saves you from doing a fsck in a
high availability failover situation, and this is good for the overall
uptime customers want to see. LFS/JFS is in the works but still far from
production ready. At the end of the day we need both features to be able to
compete, and heck, we are competing.
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