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UK Linux Conf
PaulJS writes "The UKUUG are holding a Linux Conference on 25th - 26th June 1999. Topics include GNOME (design decisions) and the ext3 filesystem which is a contender for the replacement for ext2. "
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I wish I was in the UK then. The thing is I'm moving over to the UK permanently soon so it'd me great to move it forward a month to July.
BTW I was looking at the list of credit cards they accept. What is Switch? I've never heard of it before. Is it a european card how popular is it in the UK?
If you by *that* benchmark mean the Mindcraft fiasco then I think your are a bit confused.
You need journaling for security not for performance.
If you on the other hand mean the DH Brown comparision this was one of the things they pointed out.
Perhaps Linux should have one secure filesystem with journaling, software raid/mirror possiblity and so on. And one extreamly fast filesystem thst just keeps metadata in a cache that it just writes to disk when umounting. Yes this would be cheating for benchmarks but also a nice filesystem to have for "junk" that you don't care about were a lot of creating/removing of files are going on (/tmp perhaps ?)
Why doesn't linux have /tmp/ in a dynamically resizing ramdisk, like on the amiga? I thought linux had dynamically resizing ramdisks by now..
/tmp/) That way, /tmp/ really was transient, and accessing it was very fast.
/tmp/ be deleted every reboot, for security? On the amiga, they were ( well, so long as you didn't move T: to a hard drive, or RAD: )
On the amiga, ram: could resize to fit whatever you put in it ( that's why it was, somewhat confusingly, always 100% full...)
The startup-sequence usually made a subdir t in ram:, and assigned it to T:, for temporary stuff (i.e. T: was amiga
Should the contents of
Well, on the amiga, if you wanted something like that, every file had comment field, and every file that complied with the OS guidelines had a counterpart .info file, that contained its icon image, and a list of "tooltypes", which were name/value pairs, used for storing attributes.
.info to the file, and whatever attributes the programmer though would be good...
Files without icons were assigned default ones from env:sys/def_#?.info
I always found this system much better than embedding the icon in the file (like windows), divorcing it completely in a separate hierarchy like gnome has its advantages, though (gnome)
The tooltypes contained things like FILETYPE=ILBM,
WINDOW=320,200, and the like,
and there was a "default tool" field that specified what tool was to be used to open the file when it was clicked on. Various patches such as deficons gave extended functionality + automatic filetype recognition.
BeOS implements something like this, but the connection between the file and its attributes is at a filesystem level, and based on MIME, rather than just by appending
Will I be able to "od ." and get a directory dump on an ext3 filesystem like I can on a 'proper' Unix system?
Journaling file systems save every change you ever made to the file, consuming huge amounts of disk space. It will be good to have as an option but Joe Random User isn't going to want to be running it.
A lot of OSes have stuff like this. It would be great for stashing ACL information, filetypes, comments, icons and assorted other goodies. I believe it's on the wishlist for Ext3.
Hmm, well the speakers being announced look OK, but it seems like there aren't that many, there are even some holes in the program and no choice of tracks. What is it, doesn't anyone want to visit england, or are there few native developers (other than the ubiquitous Alan Cox)?
I mention "transaction" in the above post. By that I mean a transaction to the file system meta information about files for file sytem integrity, not a transaction to a file's contents,
yeah, but isn't that because of the linux vfs layer in between? could /tmp be flagged so that it only hung around in the vfs layer, without ever being committed to disk ?
If cp on BeOS preserves all the fancy metadata, then it was specifically written to do so. cp on Unix merely reads a byte stream from one file, creates a new file and writes the stream.
Now, cp -a on Unix will attempt to duplicate the Unix metadata where it can (uid, gid, mode, time, etc.), so cp -a could certainly be extended to deal with more metadata.
The main problem is that:
(a) there is no standard means of preserving all this metadata over network filesystems. (NT, Mac, Unix, Novell all use different incompatible network filesystems which may or may not preserve metadata)
(b) there is no standard means to copy files with extended metadata between systems. Heck, even putting a file up on the web loses information such as its uid,gid,mode,time,etc...
(c) byte streams are THE metaphor for much of Unix. You shouldn't change this unless you are really improving things by doing so.
Extended metadata can be implemented by layering on top of standard files, and this may be a more flexible and faster way to do what you want. Or, you can use specialized filesystems that offer more options. (reiserfs, AFS, etc.)
No, Solaris tmpfs is shared with swap. If you fill up /tmp on Solaris, you also run your computer out of swap space. The data is still stored on disk as usual, and normal disk caching/buffering keeps recently accessed stuff in RAM as usual.
(the only reason they use it is because their native file system is slow as ass)
Well it's MUCH cheaper than similar events (most of which are only ONE day) both in the UK and elsewhere. Expect to pay £300 for most events - The UKUUG have made the event as cheap as possible and this cost covers just the room hire and the speakers expenses. The UKUUG is a non profit organisation.
As for being a member you only need to be a member for half a year (costs something like £20 - not much really) and you'll then get discounts at their other events as well as their newsletter and CD roms.
You have to be joking. This expensive? yeah right. and you get a lot of cool stuff with membership anyway. I've been to two free lectures this year already arranged by the UKUUG featuring Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman.
These lectures were free, I enjoyed them. The UKUUG have been around for years (I went to their 21st Birthday Party in 1997) so they're not a quick make a buck out of Linux organisation. Believe me they don't rip you off.
It's good to see the conference being held somewhere other than London. I'm personally fed up with having to travel to London (or the US ;) everytime I want to attend a conference.
Personally I'm very interested in the talk about Linux SMP in the conference because lately the support for SMP has been criticised as inadequate by many people. Hopefully this talk will shed the light on what is being done about it (or what people are doing wrong in implementing it).
A really successful (popular) event will mean that next years event would be really tempting for the big names such as Linus Torvalds to attend. It would be great to see the really big names attending such an event in the uk.
if you're reading ukuug - what about trying to get linus, alan cox, miguel, rms, esr,oreilly, etc all under one roof for the linux2k conference next year (I'm sure youll be having one). you got loads for rms earlier this year so a room full of them would probably attract a few thousand.
i'm sure if the public show their willingness to attend this year the ukuug will be confidedt to organise a massive event next year.
btw - are the cheap oreilly books available at your conference. the last one of your events you could get something like 25% off their books and i want to have that discount again.
What about having next years event on a beach then ;)
Well seriously I wouldn't mind an event that was held outside but as it tends to rain at times I can't imagine anyone taking you up on that idea.
Why didn't we have a conference in the UK like this sooner?
It's what the UK needs to see Linux really take off and be a success.
Although it's not a very important question I'd like to know the answer to it:
On Saturday lunch is in the programme, does that mean it is included in the price of the conference?
If the event was held in Newcastle you'd be in for a treat if cheap beer is what you're after. OK the city centre can be expensive but if you go slightly out of town you can find some real bargains as well as some really good real ales, if Newcastle Brown is your scene.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm having probs finding out details for the ext3 filesystems (partition size, max file size, max disk size etc...)
Anyone got a decent URL or any information?
Will there be any stalls at the conference selling Linux related software, book and hardware. I'd like to combine the conference with a massive buying spree. I like it when they sell stuff at conferences although my bank balance tends towards zero when this happens.
This has been covered on the linux kernel mailing list, and is in the FAQ here The gist of it is, ext2 is fast enough on half-decent hardware
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
That's why it's not been done.
Either it is or they rewrote it in the manner described. Certainly if you used the "cp" out of the GNU shell-utils, it would be broken, yes.
I think the problem is, people have gotten into bad habits. Some programs put very big files into /tmp, when they should probably use /var/tmp. And certainly on my system, elvis drops it's recovery files into /tmp when it dies (though this presumably is a compile time option).. Anyway, /tmp on ext2 is generally fast enough - there was a discussion on linux-kernel about this recently, IIRC.
NTFS, anyone? *ducks*
Posted by Martin Houston:
Unfortunatley room hire and other things like that in the physical world are not copyable and moveable for pennies (the norm for the net).
If you are invited to a large scale, well organised and FREE event you would have to wonder what the hidden agenda might be - the 'Message from our Sponsors'.
The UKUUG event is priced so that it covers its costs and be beholden to no-one for behind the scenes financial support.
Open Source software means that you do not have to put your hand in your pocket nearly as often. It cannot eliminate it completley.
If enough people support such events then there will be more of them and at lower costs.
Showing our faces at such things is also a great way to give the Open Source movement a public face. Richard Stallman's talk at the Commonwealth Institute a couple of months back even made it onto National radio in the UK. - that was a sitting in the isles capacity crowd.
Posted by David Hallowell:
The booking deadline is now on the website
--
Posted by David Hallowell:
The official booking deadline for this event is Friday 18th June - that's a week before the event starts. I mention this becasue it the time of writing this isn't mentioned on the website, however I'll make sure that is sorted out in the near future.
Of course it's best to book as soon as possible to ensure you can get a place at the evemt.
Regards,
David Hallowell
UKUUG Council Member
--
sounds like a more hackish way of doing resource forks ala MacOS
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
not only do programs dump large things in /tmp but half the stuff in there is just named pipes....which don't even matter when it comes to fs performance.....
Eh? What do you even mean? You dont have to open the file now to get at attributes. Type "man 2 stat". That's how it's done.
I remember similar things being discussed on linux-kernel in other lights, and there are many people who would never let this happen :). Most peoples' idea was to have a separate directory for these attributes, and keep filenames the same.
Doesn't sound too good. Are you developing driver software?
Now that we have the most stable OS in the world
Do we? How do you know?
Yes but they are not giving away the guaranteed I/O rate part of it. At least not according to this link though I can't find any mention of that in the news story or the SGI press release.
I haven't seen what EXT3 promises,
It will add journalling (see the white paper Stephen wrote), and probably extent based block lists and btrees by Ted Ts'o will be in there too.
Linux does need a journaling FS and XFS may be the best bet, but it won't happen quickly unless SGI puts some serious resources behind it.
SGI are employing kernel hackers and you can start to see some of the stuff they are getting up to
Also, just who has the resources to test large production systems (4+ CPUs) on an OS under test? Corporates, that's who. And they'll contribute their code to Open Source, right? Because...?
Hell, we've got MS helping us by looking for performance bottlenecks for us and that is already starting to bear fruit (I can't seem to link to that article right. Check out the article "Re:Thank you Microsoft!" by petchema. You will need Alt-F to find it.)
Personally, I think ext3 will rock. This isn't Stephen's first file system by a long chalk.
may have a price current purists will not like but will have to accept (ie less than Open Source code licenses
We can't succeed by destroying ourselves, and I don't think the Linux community will try. If XFS weren't Open Source then it would fail to gain any market share against ext3. But it will be Open Source, so it's a moot point.
Perhaps Linux should have one secure filesystem with journaling, software raid/mirror possiblity and so on.
...and so on.
I want a feature...
I used to have a few VMS accounts on a VAX and a nice feature was when a file was updated, a new file with an incremented revision suffix was made. Example:
test.c
test.c.1
test.c.2
This made it nice when making revisions to a source file and along the way I made some grave errors. Going back and finding a version was an easy process as the filesystem did the same to the binaries. If this was annoying and took up disk space, the incremental file flag could be turned off for directories or files.
There were many other dodads in the VMS filesystem, like ACL's and all that. Most I didn't use, but it was nice that they were there.
Are things like these an option for me with my Linux box?
XFS is a lot more than "just" a journaling FS. One of it's other major components is guaranteed I/O rate partitions. When you create these special partitions, the OS tests the disk I/O rate then lets you specify up to the tested rate and then the OS will guarantee you the I/O rate you selected (can be less than the max), nomatter what the machine is doing (ie even under really heavy load, network, UI etc).
This sort of thing is needed when doing uncompressed cinema res images at 24fps (or HDTV) where you need 90-130Mbyte a sec from the disk nomatter what else is going on.
There's a cable channel using 24 odd uncompressed TV res video streams for live delay rebroadcasting (across time zones) using XFS. Works nicely.
Linux doesn't need this right now. Why? Because it's kinda obvious that the whole OS needs to be in on this act, it's not just a FS thing. True, the guaranteed rate stuff can be treated discretely (ie left out). But I think people may be naive when they say, "Yay, use XFS."
I haven't seen what EXT3 promises, but I bet that the current implementation of XFS has fingers going *deep* into IRIX that won't make it a fast retro fit into Linux, compared to EXT3 (unless EXT3 is just conjecture at this time, or only a modest improvement. This'll be why Linus wants a full rewrite: to get greatly improved performance will need a lot of changes on the OS side, and if you're going to go to that effort, you'd better make it worthwhile)
Linux does need a journaling FS and XFS may be the best bet, but it won't happen quickly unless SGI puts some serious resources behind it. For any other effort to pool together enough ppl for long enough to make it happen is just too unlikely for us to just sit around hoping for.
Also, just who has the resources to test large production systems (4+ CPUs) on an OS under test? Corporates, that's who. And they'll contribute their code to Open Source, right? Because...?
This *will* all happen, but I think some of these tougher OS issues will need corporate backing that may have a price current purists will not like but will have to accept (ie less than Open Source code licenses or maybe even (cringe!) binary drivers).
My 2 cents worth.
pithy comment
Solaris /tmp is shared between disk and ram. It does that so things that would be in ram are moved to disk if they arent used very often so that you dont waste memory.... It uses all available memory as cache...(im sure linux does too)
I wonder if there will be a divide between those who want EXT3 to become the new standard or XFS (assuming it becomes a decent open-source alternative)...
I personally think XFS is great and hopefully SGI will release it under a pretty liberal license.
I can't seem to find the bug in the bug database right now, but there was a bug filed against cp on BeOS for not copying attributes. The DTS response was that since cp is an old shell program, making all sorts of wacky BeOS specific changes was undesireable. (or something like that :) They also pointed out the BeOS specific utils like copyattr, rmattr, et al.
Yeah, even though it's a not-for-profit :(
:p
venture, it's kinda prohibitive for students
and the like
I think it's really the slice that the venue
takes which hikes the price up.
Maybe the next conference should take place in
a field somewhere?
None of these tools would have to change, just the filesystem driver. All those packages you named compile using out of the box using cygnus on NT on an NTFS filesystem after all.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Are you saying that cp on BeOS is broken then?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
This is called "metadata", and is absolutely critical for any modern filesystem to implement. The more OO your environment becomes, where you're looking at devices and resources and sockets and so on through the filesystem, the more you need to be able to attach arbitrary property sheet handlers. NTFS does this extremely well.
Unfortunately there are "file mode forever" people on linux-kernel who would rather keep linux a clone of a 70's OS than add anything people might actually use.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I don't see how cp could possibly preserve meta-data. There is no copy() system call. All cp does is open the original then create a new file, read that data from the original and write it to the new file. Meta-data would certainly be lost in this situation. mv could preserve the meta-data w/o modification since it makes a system call to do all of the work. Things like tar definately would need to be changed. The changes would only take a few minutes, but then multiply that by 1000s of apps. Also, you lose some compatability with other OSes. Now while I think meta-data isn't an entirely bad idea, I think there are other ways of implimenting it that would require less work, and possibly could be more extendable in the future. Ie, having a separate directory something like .meta/ that would contain all of the meta data. Sure you would still have to modify cp and some utils to preserve the meta data, but things like tar would require no modification.
-matt
I think that ext[23] will remain popular because for many ext2 is the linux fs. Sure XFS might be great for some. But I imagine most people will just stick w/ ext2. Also, converting from ext2 to xfs would most likely be a very difficult task.
-matt
I haven't been able to find more information on SGI's donation of XFS. Anyone have some links?
Cheers,
Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
We really need an object-oriented filesystem if we want concepts like these. To get that, we also need an object-oriented language (Java is a good choice, C++ doesn't count due to lack of things like decent memory management) and on object-oriented kernel (Hurd might fit the bill some day).
Cheers,
Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
ya mean 24x7x52 ?
;-)
DONT TREAD ON ME MOÎΩN ÎABÃ
Why not let a file consist of severa "fields", every field content defining the meaning of the next field. Let's say the first field is the name, and the second field the type of the file (Yeh, and we are not in UNIX anymore?), and that type determines the meaning of the next field (For text/plain, that would be a description field and the fourth the content), i.e. the number of fields and their meaning is not defined by the FS, but by the applications using the file? OK, I dont't think this will ever be added to a FS for Linux, but hey, I want to dream too...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
I noticed that BeOS can add attributes to files that are part of the filesystem. i.e. You don't need to open the file to get at those attributes.
Wouldn't something like this be useful for ext3?
AFAIK, it would speed up searches for files...
Does XFS do this?
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
I'm not sure if FS merrits is off topic, but since it was mentioned in the article... Journaled FS' are great. There is slightly more overhead involved there, but the stability offered is wonderfull. I work with AIX at work & can't count how many times I've had to just power off the system and it comes right back up. Journaling also provides *some* (though little) level of abstraction, allowing for more deviation from the standard partition scheme. One of the things I've wanted to see in Linux is the Logical Volume Manager from IBM, or something like Verritas, or HP's Volume Manager. If we could build that into the kernel, it seems to me that these would be the "features" that everyone wants to see. Now that we have the most stable OS in the world, I hope we can provide all the features that make the *commercial* OS' so consumable.
At last a UK Linux conference I can actually afford to attend. The recent Netproject and UNICOM Linux and open source conferences cost around £300 (excluding VAT) to attend and when you add the travelling expenses to that they were really unaffordable and these events were only for one day.
However this one is really excellent value for money as this one only costs £70.50 inc VAT (+ £20.57 for UKUUG membership if you're not a member).
Now all I have to do is check that I can get time off work and if I can I'll be there.
Cool Linux PC Badges!
I so excited to see, that there was going to be an
event here in England, giving me a bit more chance
to meet and hear more Linux people.
Unfortunately, the thing seems to be a bit "steep":
a pass is £78 for the 2 days and nearly £60 if
only attending on the Saturday. Plus you have to
be a member of Uk's unix group... I shall have to wait for
something a bit more Open.
-- Stupidity has a certain charm, ignorance does not. --Frank Zappa
Perhaps Linux should have one secure filesystem with journaling, software raid/mirror possiblity and so on. And one extreamly fast filesystem
How about XFS = Secure FS and ext3 = Fast FS? I don't think (for my purposes) that i need a journaling FS, I'm doing pretty good without it, so i could use ext3, while anyone who needed the extra security could still have it.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!