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The Hairy State of Linux Filesystems
RazvanM writes "Do the OSes really shrink? Perhaps the user space (MySQL, CUPS) is getting slimmer, but how about the internals? Using as a metric the number of external calls between the filesystem modules and the rest of the Linux kernel I argue that this is not the case. The evidence is a graph that shows the evolution of 15 filesystems from 2.6.11 to 2.6.28 along with the current state (2.6.28) for 24 filesystems. Some filesystems that stand out are: nfs for leading in both number of calls and speed of growth; ext4 and fuse for their above-average speed of growth and 9p for its roller coaster path."
got to make one call...
Everybody Wang-Chung tonight!
While OSes may be "sliming down" as the article says, what does the removal of standard db packages from Ubuntu have to do with filesystem-related kernel calls?
The article doesn't seem to mention the possiblity that more functionality may be pushed into the kernel from userspace, which might make sense in other situations, but I don't think that argument would hold up here.
I am struggling to make the connection between the summary and the so-called article. The fact that they are not stripping/locking fs functionality means that OSes aren't shrinking? That's the hypothesis?
Two things of note with NFS...
1. NFSv4 support was added. v4 is complex and has a lot of authentication stuff in it that wasn't in v3.
2. SunRPC is "part" of the NFS tree, but is effectively just a transport layer. It is completely abstracted, hence the numbers of symbols. It could be used for other stuff, so it pushes up that number too.
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You are kidding arent you ?
Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.
Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.
I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
What's your argument here? That filesystem code in the kernel shouldn't be growing more sophisticated over time?
This rings of the armchair-pundit argument that the kernel is getting more and more "bloated" and a breath later crying out that there still aren't Linux hardware drivers for every computing device ever made.
The state of Linux filesystems may be in disarray, but it's nothing to kill your wife over...
*rimshot*
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