Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop, day 1

Actually, it was Josef 'Jeff' Sipek who deserves the first mention of application programmers asking for pones, when he posted an April Fools patch submission for the new open flag, O_PONIES --- unreasonable file system assumptions desired.

Another file system developer who had worked on two major filesystems (ext4 and XFS) had a t-shirt on that had O_PONIES written on the front. And the joker who distributed the colouring book pages with pictures of ponies was another file system developer working yet another next generation file system.

Application programmers, while they were questioning my competence, judgement, and even my paternity, didn't quite believe me when I told them that I was the moderate on these issues, but it's safe to say that most of the file system developers in the room were utterly unsympathetic to the idea that it was a good idea to encourage application programmers to avoid the use of fsync(). About the only one who was also a moderate in the room was Val Aurora (formerly Henson). Both of us recognize that ext3's data=ordered mode was responsible for people deciding that fsync() was harmful, and I've said already that if we had known how badly it would encourage application writers to Do The Wrong Thing, I would have pushed hard not to make data=ordered the default. Unfortunately, memory wasn't as plentiful in those days, and so the associated page writeback latencies wasn't nearly as bad ten years ago.