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by naniwaduni 1467 days ago
It's not that it isn't a fantastic design—I believe as much as the next person that UFS2 is basically best-in-class as a "traditional" dumb filesystem, and that soft updates is fundamentally a Right Approach. I wouldn't have mentioned it if I didn't!

But it's hard not to see that it's darn near barren ground for further work in filesystem design. And it's easy to see why if you scan the first paper—just look at the dependency flowcharts! Fundamentally the design is ... hard for mere mortals to work on. It's practically a miracle that it even happened once; nobody is keen on starting any new implementations.

I choose to fault filesystem implementers for not being (more) superhuman for this failing, obviously.

1 comments

I’m not sure where the legend about softupdates being more complicated then journaling came from, but even comparing number of lines of code between SU and XFS journaling is enough to disprove it.
The difficulty is not that there's too much code.
The difficulty is allegedly that the mechanism is too complex. Which seems to be just an urban legend.