5 ms·

That's not a problem with NFS, that's a fundamental issue with computers. Things fail. Nothing protects you from losing data, your local log-structured filing s

That's not a problem with NFS, that's a fundamental issue with computers. Things fail. Nothing protects you from losing data, your local log-structured filing systems won't save you either. They'll help you protect an existing state from corruption, but they don't protect you from loss. That new request you just received when a hardware failure occurred? Say goodbye to it, you've no way of ensuring it will make it to storage when the disks have caught fire. Later on, when you've put out the blaze, all that algorithms can do is tell you when things started to get lost.

quazeekotl 7y ago
This is a bad excuse for the really flakey nature of nfs, other network filesystems do not have its issues.
- Volt 7y ago
  Like which ones?
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    AFS is a good example of a network filesystem that takes properties of the network into account, however its a little weird and not fully compliant with POSIX filesystem semantics. However, it scales like crazy and is very powerful and reliable.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - IcePic 7y ago
      I ran AFS for very long, it does have issues which perhaps other network fs'es don't even notice. It has issues with clients behind NAT for instance, the callbacks won't work. The limit of files in a dir is less than for local filesystems (or were) so Maildirs with long mail filenames could get into something that feels like "out of inodes but not space" situations. All in all, it was very nice though.
zzzcpan 7y ago
What you are talking about is unrelated to NFSs broken model. Although still important, because these are the reasons why we don't need fsync() to actually flush data to disk for example, it can be asynchronous and only needs to add a checkpoint to your log structured filesystem that will be written to disk later, once enough data is buffered or long enough time has passed.
- labawi 7y ago
  Often ordering would be enough, but sometimes you do want to wail until the changes are on disk. It's a mess.

quazeekotl 7y ago

This is a bad excuse for the really flakey nature of nfs, other network filesystems do not have its issues.

Volt 7y ago
Like which ones?
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  AFS is a good example of a network filesystem that takes properties of the network into account, however its a little weird and not fully compliant with POSIX filesystem semantics. However, it scales like crazy and is very powerful and reliable.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - IcePic 7y ago
    I ran AFS for very long, it does have issues which perhaps other network fs'es don't even notice. It has issues with clients behind NAT for instance, the callbacks won't work. The limit of files in a dir is less than for local filesystems (or were) so Maildirs with long mail filenames could get into something that feels like "out of inodes but not space" situations. All in all, it was very nice though.

zzzcpan 7y ago

What you are talking about is unrelated to NFSs broken model. Although still important, because these are the reasons why we don't need fsync() to actually flush data to disk for example, it can be asynchronous and only needs to add a checkpoint to your log structured filesystem that will be written to disk later, once enough data is buffered or long enough time has passed.

labawi 7y ago
Often ordering would be enough, but sometimes you do want to wail until the changes are on disk. It's a mess.