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Yes, if the discussion has some fascinating relevance for the general HN readership, I can't figure it out. Linus doesn't come off very well, trying to settle
by dkarl 15y ago
Yes, if the discussion has some fascinating relevance for the general HN readership, I can't figure it out. Linus doesn't come off very well, trying to settle a discussion with common sense and sarcasm while the other people on the thread use facts and examples to paint a more complicated picture.
People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided.
I use sshfs all the time. Much of the software I use every day only needs to meet "toy" standards to be useful to me. What is Linus on about here?
- icebraining 15y agoYes, but would you rely on it as the filesystem for a public server? His point isn't that userspace filesystems are useless, but they are much slower, so the existence of a Fuse filesystem is not an argument for not including a kernel space filesystem in the kernel.
- swdunlop 15y agoLinus wasn't very clear, but the issue has more to do with the cost of context switches between the kernel and a userland process to support a userland filesystem. These switches are relatively expensive; a good example is the relative throughput of a LUKS/DM-CRYPT encrypted volume compared to a Truecrypt volume with equivalent cipher selections. LUKS' throughput is much higher, simply because it does not add at least two more kernel<->userspace transitions on every read and write.