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Working with Files Is Hard (2019)

This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB.

Chidambaram et al., SOSP’13 looked at the performance cost of this by modifying ext4 to add a barrier mechanism that doesn't flush caches and they found that, if they modified software appropriately and used their barrier operation where a full fsync wasn't necessary, they were able to achieve performance roughly equivalent to ext4 with cache flushing entirely disabled (which is unsafe and can lead to data corruption) without sacrificing safety. Yesterday, Ramsey Nasser gave a talk where he made a very compelling case that something was a serious problem, which was followed up by a comment that his proposed solution will have a hard time getting adoption. Thanks to Leah Hanson, Gary Bernhardt, Kamal Marhubi, Rebecca Isaacs, Jesse Luehrs, Tom Crayford, Wesley Aptekar-Cassels, Rose Ames, chozu@fedi.absturztau.be, and Benjamin Gilbert for their help with this talk!

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