[RFC] remove filestreams support?

[Stewart Smith]

On Mon, 4 Jul 2011 11:34:43 -0400, Christoph Hellwig <hch at infradead.org> wrote:
> I'd like to know if there are any people actively using the filestreams
> support in XFS (-o filestreams).  It's pretty much a fringe feature, and
> I've not seen any user reports for it, while it never passes all its
> XFSQA tests reliably.  It was added specificly for CXFS media streaming
> operations on one particular array model that hasn't been sold for a
> long time.  The feature purely is an in-memory one so unlike for example
> the realtime device there are no issue about beeing able to read old
> filesystems.  The filestreams specific files are around 1500 lines of
> code, not even counting the hooks in the core XFS codebase.

I used it a bit on MythTV box to help circumvent the stupid behaviour of
it fsync()ing every second[1] leading to poor file layout on disk. I
found that filestreams worked a bit better than just setting allocsize
mount option... but I wouldn't be screaming too much if it went away....


[1] which was to work around ext3 taking locks for so long that you'd
then miss part of your TV program

-- 
Stewart Smith