[ale] Ext4 adoption anyone?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 04:37:42 -0500
Pat Regan <thehead at patshead.com> wrote:

> Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> > (For the record, I don't mind binary-only drivers from a hardware
> > manufacturer, assuming that (a) the driver works and is guaranteed
> > to work, and (b) it has well-written documentation that says how to
> > use it.  That said, I don't know of many binary-only drivers that
> > are actually of any satisfying level of quality; even NVIDIA
> > drivers kinda stink depending on the chipset you're using.)
> 
> I had a basic desktop last year that was using the binary ati driver.
> After an upgrade, the video chipset was no longer supported by the
> binary driver.  Unfortunately, there were also issues with the open
> source driver and the older binary blob didn't work with the newer
> xorg release.
> 
> Fortunately, it turned out that a single setting tweak in the
> xorg.conf fixed the problem.  I'm sure you know what could have
> happened, and how mad I'd have been if that were something more
> important than a crappy video card :)

Yeah, decent support would be a good thing, too.  After all, if you're
paying for the hardware and the vendor supplies a binary driver, well,
they should support that, too, yeah?

It would probably not hurt things if X could support something like an
emulation of previous driver ABIs, but I would imagine that would be
horribly complex to maintain.

> > Hrm.  I will certainly try that out and see how it does.  I had
> > fallen back to using scp/sftp/rsync (depending on what I am doing)
> > since they're "easy enough" to use.  But having a real mount point
> > is always better, when it works all the time.  :)
> 
> Wouldn't it be nice if the sshfs filesystem were smart enough to rsync
> on a copy/move when it made sense? :)

Hrm... yes, but then again sometimes *I* am not smart enough to rsync
when I should, I know more about my filesystem layout than sshfs!  ;-)

I'd imagine, though, that it would be possible to implement a FUSE
filesystem that actually spoke its own more efficient protocol and used
SSH as a tunnel, such that you could get block-level access to the
files on the remote filesystem without worrying about caching the
entire bloody file.  I wonder if something like that already exists,
since it'd be extremely useful over long distances or slow links.

I don't know anything about the current sshfs implementation as I
haven't looked at it, but I would wager that it fetches the file,
caches it locally, and then sends it back when you change it, since it
says it uses SFTP to do its work.

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
http://www.trausch.us/
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