Josef “Jeff” Sipek

OLS 2006 - Day 5

The day began with an awesome presentation I gave about Unionfs. :) Shawn was recoding it, but after the presentation, he found out that the video turned out to be crap. He has audio only. I’m sure he’ll share it soon. :) I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people that use Unionfs or were interested in Unionfs.

The keynote was excelent as always. However I must say that Greg K-H made it sound like any piece of code will get into the kernel. Yeah, right :) But he did say few nice things about the status of Linux.

After the keynote, there was the GPG key signing - which I did not attend, although I wanted to. Instead we went to get some food. Food was good, we (I, Dave, Mike Halcrow, and Prof. Zadok) talked about a bunch of things ranging from MythTV and terabyte storage servers, to things like the number of ants in Texas. (Apparently, it is a lot of fun to watch termites and fire ants battle to the death. O_o )

We finished food around 19:45 which was about right to head over to the Black Thorn for the after event party. Just as last year it was quite interesting. Pretty much as soon as I got there, I noticed Peter Baudis aka. pasky - the cogito maintainer. We chatted about how git and Mercurial differ (Matt’s talk the day before came in handy :) ). I mentioned I was slowly working on a generic benchmark script that would test a number of popular SCMs including Mercurial, Subversion, and CVS. He was thrilled about the prospect of knowing exactly where git sucked compared to other SCMs - my guess is that he wants to fix it and make it better, a noble goal, but unnecessary as Mercurial already exists and why reinvent the wheel? ;) Seriously, though, I think a lot of people would benefit from knowing exactly where each SCM excels, and where each sucks. The nice thing about collaborating with the git people would be that it would make it more apparent that this wouldn’t just be yet-another-fake-test. After some time, a bunch of other Czech people poped up right next to us (people like, Pavel Machek, etc.). It was quite interesting. :)

After than I joined a converation with some Intel people. As it turns out, one of the Intel people is working on the e1000 driver — awesome piece of hardware, by the way, don’t ever buy anything other than it. :) Some time later, Jens Axboe joined the group briefly. When he said my name seemed familiar, I mentioned how I tried to implement IO priorities - and failed :) Later on, a guy from University of Toronto joined the group. He approached me earlier in the day about unionfs on clusters. We chatted about things ranging from school (undergraduate program, and grad school) to submitting kernel code to lkml. The e1000 guy said a similar thing that we should split unionfs up into a few patches, and send it off. During the event a few people still asked me about Unionfs, which felt good :)

Then, I decided that it would be fun to talk to some IRC people. I found John Levon and Seth Arnold. We sat down, and had an interesting conversation about a number of things. Since at least some of these were quite interesting, here’s a list:

  1. How can I deal with VFS and not drink vodka or other hard liquer
  2. Everybody hates CDE, even people at Sun
  3. Solaris is dead (well, they didn’t say it, but that’s the feeling I got)
  4. Brittons have some interesting sports or at least some of the expected behavior during the sport is interesting, namely:

  1. darts - you are expected to drink as you play
  2. I can’t recall the name - gigantic pool table
  3. cricket - everyone smokes "reefer" (to quote Movement, I just find this name of the substance mildly amusing) because their games sometimes take several days

After that, they kicked everyone out as it was 2:45 already. We (Seth, John, and I) went back to the hotel. There, Prof. Zadok and Chip (who arrived on Friday) were about to get up and head to the airport. :) I just went to bed.

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.

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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