Josef “Jeff” Sipek

OLS 2006 - Day 4

Friday was kind of interesting. The talks were little weaker, but there were some interesting ones. For example, Matt Mackall’s Towards a Better SCM: Revlog and Mercurial talk was a nice way to learn how Mercurial stores the history. I got tired so I went back to the hotel, and fell asleep for few hours. I woke up just in time to head over to the conference center for the 20:00 Stackable file systems BOF. That was interesting. A lot of useful people showed up, including Christoph Hellwig, Ted Tso, Val Henson, Steve French (Samba/CIFS guy), Jan Blunck,Eric Van Hensbergen (plan9 fs implementation in Linux) and many more. Topics included limited stackspace (4K on i386), cache consistency, locking, and nameidata structure brain damage.

As we planed before, after the BOF we invited everyone over to the hotel for some snacks and drinks. That’s where things got really interesting. I spent a lot of time with Jan Blunck and Eric Van Hensbergen talking about the proper way to do unions. Three people, three different ways to union files :)

After that we had some fun with the stack space issue and Reiserfs (and Hans’s approach to open source).

stack space
There should be a competition "who can create the largest storage stack without overflowing the stack." For example, unionfs on top of gzipfs on top of versionfs on top of device mapper on top of md on top of scsi over ethernet on top of ppp tunneled thought ssh …. you get the idea
Reiserfs
Apparently, Christoph once fixed something trivial in reiserfs code, he sent the patch to Hans, and in return he got a gigantic legal document (I know exactly what he is talking about as I have submitted a patch once as well). Well, he didn’t like it, so he gave Hans a bunch of options one of which included certain sum of money for copyright to the code. Interestingly enough, Hans accepted. Too bad I didn’t know about this story before, I might have made some money of off my one line fix to the reiserfs section in the Kconfig file. :)

I have to say, I really want to look at how plan9 works thanks to the conversation I had with Eric Van Hensbergen. It seems to have a lot of really good ideas. Hrm, now that I think about it, I might install it one of my old boxes. Yeah, I know I am odd.

OLS 2006 - Here I come

So, with little over 12 hours before my flight takes off, I am starting to pack and all the other related things - Yay! This year, I’m going to OLS not as an attendee, but also as a speaker. As you may have guessed, the topic is Unionfs. See you in Ottawa!

Busy

So, yeah. I finally forced myself to write one of these blog entries. Woohoo! I’ve been quite busy for the past two weeks (doing some cluster building, and then slideshow making - I leave for OLS in only 4 days!) I must say it should be interesting - the presentation, the impromptu stackable filesystems BOF.

I just found this very bizarre image (mirror) (too wide to include it here) which explains rather humorously Wikipedia article: RAID.

An environmental simulator for the FDNY computer aided dispatch system

So, while I was finishing a paper for LISA (a part of USENIX), I was going through the ACM Digital Library looking for some useful papers, when I came across: An environmental simulator for the FDNY computer aided dispatch system (PDF). The amusing thing is the begining of the abstract:

FDNY’s MICS computer-aided dispatch system is designed about dual PDP 11/45s and supported in fallback by dual INTEL 8080 micro-processors. The computer processes alarms, assigns available units, notifies these units by voice and hard copy terminals located in the fire stations, monitors status changes of firefighting units and incidents, and dynamically adjusts firefighting coverage for maximum effect.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when the paper was published in 1976.

Big Cheese

So, the summer rolled around and guess what, I am now the head maintainer of Unionfs. We’ll see how it goes.

OLS 2006 Paper - Done!

Oh yeah, I should have probably posted this earlier…the OLS paper is done. And it looks good :)

OLS 2006 Proposal - Accepted

So, about two weeks ago, we (the FSL) decided to write few proposals for Ottawa Linux Symposium. One of them was: UnionFS: User and Community-oriented Development of a Unioning Filesystem by (in alphabetical order) Charles P. Wright, David Quigley, Josef Sipek.

The other day, I got an email saying that it got accepted. Yay! So, we have to write an abstract by March 1st, and then the paper by April 1st.

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