[Ksummit-discuss] [topic] Richer internal block API

[Greg KH]

On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 03:44:52PM -0700, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On 05/29/2014 04:43 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> >...you know how this all works, we don't have to have meetings in order to
> >do design decisions that are "large".
> 
> 
> Perhaps there is something wrong with that approach. Certainly in regards to
> how to bridge the gap between what we now have for logical volume support,
> and what we should have, or what BSD has, that approach is demonstrably a
> perennial failure. After all these years, we still have dm and md as
> separate islands, no usable snapshotting block device, and roughly zero
> interaction between filesystems and volume managers.

People have talked about this for over a very long time.  I've seen
Neil give numerous presentations about this for what, a decade now?

It must not be important enough for anyone to actually do the work.  Or,
more likely, no one has been able to convince a company to sponsor the
work.  So perhaps, it isn't that major of a thing that is needed to be
done?

> The larger issue would be, why is there no design process in Linux for
> large design issues?

There is, an "evolutionary" process.  If you take a look at a 4 or 5
year old kernel, major things have happened.  It's just that if you are
in the middle of it all, it doesn't look like "large" things have
changed.

thanks,

greg k-h