Re: Linux/Pro -- clusters

[Daniel Phillips]

On December 4, 2001 03:09 am, Donald Becker wrote:
> To bring this branch back on point: we should distinguish between
> design for an arbitrary and unpredictable goal (e.g. 128 way SMP)
> vs. putting some design into things that we are supposed to already
> understan
>    [...]
>    a VFS layer that doesn't require the kernel to know a priori all of
>      the filesystem types that might be loaded

Right, there's a consensus that the fs includes have to fixed and that it 
should be in 2.5.lownum.  The precise plan isn't fully evolved yet ;)

See fsdevel for the thread, 3-4 months ago.  IIRC, the favored idea (Linus's) 
was to make the generic struct inode part of the fs-specific inode instead of 
the other way around, which resolves the question of how the compiler 
calculates the size/layout of an inode.

This is going to be a pervasive change that someone has to do all in one
day, so it remains to be seen when/if that is actually going to happen.

It's also going to break every out-of-tree filesystem.

--
Daniel