Re: [RFC][PATCH 1/2] Add a super operation for writeback

From: Christian Stroetmann
Date: Tue Jun 03 2014 - 12:32:01 EST


On the 3rd of June 2014 16:57, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 07:30:32AM +0200, Christian Stroetmann wrote:
In general, I do not believe that the complexity problems of soft updates,
atomic writes, and related techniques can be solved by hand/manually. So my
suggestion is to automatically handle the complexity problem of e.g.
dependancies in a way that is comparable to a(n on-the-fly) file-system
compiler so to say that works on a very large dependancy graph (having
several billions of graph vertices actually). And at this point an
abstraction like it is given with Featherstitch helps to feed and control
this special FS compiler.
Well, if you want to try to implement something like this, go for it!

I am already active since some weeks.

I'd be very curious to see how well (a) how much CPU overhead it takes
to crunch on a dependency graph with billions of vertices, and (b) how
easily can it be to express these dependencies and maintainable such a
dependency language would be. Sounds like a great research topic, and

To a) A run is expected to take some few hours on a single computing node.

Also, such a graph processing must not be done all the time, but only if a new application demands a specific handling of the data in respect to e.g. one of the ACID criterias. That is the reason why I put "on-the-fly" in paranthesis.

To b) I hoped that file system developers could make some suggestions or point to some no-gos.
I am also thinking about Petri-Nets in this relation, though it is just an idea.

I would also like to mention that it could be used in conjunction with Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) as well.

I'll note the Call For Papers for FAST 2015 is out, and if you can
solve these problems, it would make a great FAST 2015 submission:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast15/call-for-papers

Are you serious or have I missed the 1st of April once again?
Actually, I could only write a general overview about the approach comparable to a white paper, but nothing more.

Cheers,

- Ted


Best regards
Christian
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