Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:30:43 -0400 | From | Theodore Tso <> | Subject | Re: Starting a grad project that may change kernel VFS. Early research Re: Starting a grad project that may change kernel VFS. Early research |
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Something which I urge you to think about is whether optimizing du -s is really worth it; this is not at all obvious. If it's going to cost performance; if it's going to require non-backwards compatible changes to filesystems; if it means introducing changes to the semantics of hard links --- please *seriously* consider whether or not it's worth it.
In what workload or use case is "du -s" something that gets done frequently? And is it really worth adding code complexity and slowing down much more common operations, such as writing files?
If the goal is do a project that gets you a master's degree or a Ph.D., ok, fine; there are plenty of academic degrees and honors which are given for ideas that are completely impractical and/or useless in the real world.
If your goal is to create a feature that will be accepted into mainline, then you need to provide a lot more justification that this is actually a good and worthwhile thing to do, and that the benefits outweigh the costs (in code complexity, long-term maintenance, performance regressions, etc.)
- Ted
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