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> It should be possible to make a filesystem with drastically better performance on SMR drives given the right low-level access, probably based on something mor
by klodolph 7y ago
> It should be possible to make a filesystem with drastically better performance on SMR drives given the right low-level access, probably based on something more like a log-structured merge-tree, like e.g. LevelDB.
The filesystem would need to do periodic compaction. You would necessarily encounter situations where a write to “allocated” data would fail because the disk is out of space, which is a new, surprising error that would undoubtedly confuse some user-space programs.
- eru 7y agoYou could go around that error by claiming a lower capacity. All file systems take up a bit of space to store their own metadata etc. So users are already used to 'lose' a bit of space on formatting.
- klodolph 7y agoThat wouldn’t fix it. As long as programs can write faster than the compaction algorithm frees space, you can run out of space. The only solutions I see here are to block IO until the compaction algorithm frees space, or return ENOSPC. Both options violate assumptions that real-world programs make.