Comment by rektide
3 years ago
Very excited to see this forerunning adopter of NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS), the follow-up/merged effort to OpenChannel Flash (and also useful for Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR))! We don't use SSDs particularly well & this could be an epic leap forward. I'm especially excited to see how cheaper DRAM-less drives do, over time, leaving much more to the OS/system. ZNS is a pretty simple idea - that it defines small-ish write-blocks called Zones that are explicitly "opened" for writing (but not rewriting) data, which then become "closed" as they fill or are done. Additionally a new Append command let's data be added sequentially, with the driver determining the final address within the zone (typically the host defines the exact location ahead of time when writing).
These capabilities are sufficient to enable a much better use of the SSD than typical access patterns, which SSDFS here is working to leverage.
It's can be hard to appreciate on the surface of it what these small capabilities lead to, but it allows for a far more flash-friendly access pattern, which SSDFS here is leveraging. Zoned Storage[1] has a fairly technical intro page, and a number of videos, which promise a lot. I'm extremely pleased with how strong a foot forward Viacheslav makes as they describe how they came at this problem from the other side, of building a FS to leverage it: I think they did a great job conveying how this capability works in practice & how much better it can be. This is such a thrilling development!
Viacheslav is one of those many russians who fully endorses russia's war of invasion in Ukraine while living in SFBA. I wish this fs the same fate as ReiserFS.
I mean its open source, why wish for a project with actual utility to die when its completely forkable? Its not like the code itself is harmful, just the author according to what you've said.
(tldr; war unequivocally evil; not all russians unequivocally evil; pure science itself never unequivocally evil)
Wish harm on the person, no the tech /s
But seriously, as much as I strongy disapprove of this whole russian invasion fiasco (and the humanitarian impact of a senseless conflict), I think that there's still merit on the technology itself. Its not like Viacheslav is bombing ukrainian civilians in order to squeeze some performance inprovements out of the storage media. For the same reason, I won't stop running nginx on my boxes.
Many famous inventors were bastards in real life. Take for example the guy who invented the machine gun, allowing killing and maiming on a whole new level. Many Nobel Prize winners, who worked out the basis of whole new research areas were eugenics proponents. Hell, Schrödinger was probably a kid diddler; John Lennon, a wife beater; the corn flakes guy was a nut; disgusting bastards, the whole lot of them. But that's because they were people. Its not like Kevin Spacey became a bad actor once the sexual abuse allegations were made public, or Chuck Berry's music became bad when people realized he was a pervert. Likewise, all those people contributed to their fields in ways that still influence how we live today.
And to be completely fair, ReiserFS has been deprecated not because of the infamous murder case (of which Hans should prob be finishing his sentence soon), but because many of its contributions were superceded by new tech present in modern, well-supported alternatives. Also the reliance on kernel locks. And it inspired some of these following improvements.
That's not at all pleasant to hear, thanks sharing. It is most likely just fancy & wouldnt have gone anywhere, but I had sort of hoped to play with this & find some way to be useful, contribute some code. Very rebuffing having that association.