On 11/14/07, Chuck Lever <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Nov 13, 2007, at 7:04 PM, Jon Smirl wrote: > > Is it feasible to do something like this in the linux file system > > architecture? > > > > Beagle beats on my disk for an hour when I reboot. Of course I don't > > like that and I shut Beagle off. > > Leopard, by the way, does exactly this: it has a daemon that starts > at boot time and taps FSEvents then journals file system changes to a > well-known file on local disk.
Logging file systems have all of the needed info. Plus they know what is going on with rollback/replay after a crash. How about a fs API where Beagle has a token for a checkpoint, and then it can ask for a recreation of inotify events from that point forward. It's always possible for the file system to say I can't do that and trigger a full rebuild from Beagle. Daemons that aren't coordinated with the file system have a window during crash/reboot where they can get confused. Without low level support like this Beagle is forced to do a rescan on every boot. Since I crash my machine all of the time the disk load from rebooting is intolerable and I turn Beagle off. Even just turning the machine on in the morning generates an annoyingly large load on the disk. > > I don't see why this couldn't be done on Linux as well. > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > From: Jon Smirl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Date: Nov 13, 2007 4:44 PM > > Subject: Re: Strange "beagle" interaction.. > > To: Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Cc: "J. Bruce Fields" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Junio C Hamano > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Git Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Johannes > > Schindelin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > > > On 11/13/07, Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> > >> > >> On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, J. Bruce Fields wrote: > >>> > >>> Last I ran across this, I believe I found it was adding extended > >>> attributes to the file. > >> > >> Yeah, I just straced it and found the same thing. It's saving > >> fingerprints > >> and mtimes to files in the extended attributes. > > > > Things like Beagle need a guaranteed log of global inotify events. > > That would let them efficiently find changes made since the last time > > they updated their index. > > > > Right now every time Beagle starts it hasn't got a clue what has > > changed in the file system since it was last run. This forces Beagle > > to rescan the entire filesystem every time it is started. The xattrs > > are used as cache to reduce this load somewhat. > > > > A better solution would be for the kernel to log inotify events to > > disk in a manner that survives reboots. When Beagle starts it would > > locate its last checkpoint and then process the logged inotify events > > from that time forward. This inotify logging needs to be bullet proof > > or it will mess up your Beagle index. > > > > Logged files systems already contain the logged inotify data (in their > > own internal form). There's just no universal API for retrieving it in > > a file system independent manner. > > > >> > >>> Yeah, I just turned off beagle. It looked to me like it was doing > >>> something wrongheaded. > >> > >> Gaah. The problem is, setting xattrs does actually change ctime. > >> Which > >> means that if we want to make git play nice with beagle, I guess > >> we have > >> to just remove the comparison of ctime. > >> > >> Oh, well. Git doesn't *require* it, but I like the notion of > >> checking the > >> inode really really carefully. But it looks like it may not be an > >> option, > >> because of file indexers hiding stuff behind our backs. > >> > >> Or we could just tell people not to run beagle on their git trees, > >> but I > >> suspect some people will actually *want* to. Even if it flushes > >> their disk > >> caches. > >> > >> Linus > >> - > >> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in > >> the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >> More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > >> > > > > > > -- > > Jon Smirl > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > -- > > Jon Smirl > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > - > > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux- > > fsdevel" in > > the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > > -- > Chuck Lever > chuck[dot]lever[at]oracle[dot]com > > > > -- Jon Smirl [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
