> As recently as 2013, a leading file systems developer was still arguing that file systems didn’t have to save file data reliably by mocking users for playing computer games.
Tso neither mocks users for playing games, nor argues that filesystems should not be required to be reliable. He says:
"[Lortie, that filesystem operation that you said was guaranteed to be safe actually isn't safe. You mis-read the docs. It's racy, and here are the two races that you could lose. Losing both could lose your data. Here's an analogy to illustrate the races: ]
The failure scenario would probably be something like the user who plays tux racer all the time, and uses crappy proprietary drivers that crash the system every single time an OpenGL application exits. If they think that's normal, and are willing to live with the crap proprietary drivers, and they are also the sort of people who carefully position all of their windows to be precisely just so, and if the !@#!?! desktop libraries are still bogusly rewriting the entire contents of every single registry file, regardless of whether the application changed anything --- then eventually, said user will whine about how the hours she spent obsessively setting up their window layout got lost after Tux Racer creashed (sic) their system again."
Notice the carefully constructed persona used in the illustration:
* Tolerates terrible, crashy, OpenGL drivers.
* Makes use of the OpenGL drivers by playing a video game.
* Spends a lot of time meticulously positioning application windows.
* Uses a WM that stores application window position in a single file that gets updated all the damn time for no reason at all.
* Whines when the enormous amount of work put into positioning windows gets wasted when the poorly-designed software they're using crashes and takes some of their data with it.
Tso neither mocks users for playing games, nor argues that filesystems should not be required to be reliable. He says:
"[Lortie, that filesystem operation that you said was guaranteed to be safe actually isn't safe. You mis-read the docs. It's racy, and here are the two races that you could lose. Losing both could lose your data. Here's an analogy to illustrate the races: ]
The failure scenario would probably be something like the user who plays tux racer all the time, and uses crappy proprietary drivers that crash the system every single time an OpenGL application exits. If they think that's normal, and are willing to live with the crap proprietary drivers, and they are also the sort of people who carefully position all of their windows to be precisely just so, and if the !@#!?! desktop libraries are still bogusly rewriting the entire contents of every single registry file, regardless of whether the application changed anything --- then eventually, said user will whine about how the hours she spent obsessively setting up their window layout got lost after Tux Racer creashed (sic) their system again."
Notice the carefully constructed persona used in the illustration:
* Tolerates terrible, crashy, OpenGL drivers.
* Makes use of the OpenGL drivers by playing a video game.
* Spends a lot of time meticulously positioning application windows.
* Uses a WM that stores application window position in a single file that gets updated all the damn time for no reason at all.
* Whines when the enormous amount of work put into positioning windows gets wasted when the poorly-designed software they're using crashes and takes some of their data with it.