Description of the Journaling topology

[Robert Clark]

Matthew Dillon wrote:

:Barely understanding the implication of this concept it strikes me 
:mostly logical, clean and relative simple.
:Which makes me curious why other project haven't done this already?
:What is the major reason that other project follow a different path then 
:this one?
:
:-- 
:mph

   The concepts aren't new but my recollection is that most journaling
   implementations are directly integrated into the filesystem and this
   tends to limit their flexibility.  Making the journaling a kernel 
   layer and taking into account forward-looking goals really opens up
   the possibilities.  Forward-looking is not something that people are
   generally good at in either the open-source or the commercial world.
   (proof of concept: why ext3 is such a mess, why existing journaling
   implementations are so limited in scope).

 

So, is this meta-data journaling? Or would there be data journaling as well?

Would meta-data and data be in the same stream, or would there separate 
streams for each?
Separate streams would lead to sych problems?

   Generally speaking open-source OS projects have been severely lacking 
   with regards to the construction of better backup paradigms, mostly 
   relying on hardware (e.g. RAID) and external technologies (e.g. NetApp),
   or relying on major assumptions with regards to disk data reliability
   (which are no longer true) (e.g. Ext3Fs, Reiser), or block-level
   snapshots (softupdates) which are cludgy.  External utilities like
   dump and tar have no realtime capabilities whatsoever and aren't even
   reliable when used as designed if the filesystem is being modified
   while a dump/tar is in progress.

 

Some of the NAS solutions have gone to dressed up version of "dump and 
restore" for backups.
This feels like a step backwards if you're accustomed to having a 
database track which individual
objects can be restored, and to what date, etc.

Backup solutions that watch for changes in a file while the backup is 
progressing are a pain as
well. Can take a long time to stat all the objects in a big file system too.

   None of these integrated technologies really give me any peace of mind.  
   My number one desire is to have a technology that can give the sysop 
   actual peace of mind that his systems aren't going to crash and burn
   beyond any chance of recovery, be it through a software bug, disk crash,
   building fire, or intentional destruction (hackers).

 

Would people stand for a VM system where the SA had to periodically pick 
which pages to swap
to disk? Why do people stand a system where the SA has to periodically 
pick which files get put
on tape?

There are cycles to spare. The OS should take care of it. (?)

   Our journaling layer is designed to address these issues.  Providing a
   high level filesystem operations change stream off-site is far more
   robust then providing a block device level change stream.  Being able
   to go off-site in real-time to a secure (or more secure) machine can't
   be beat.  Being able to rewind the journal to any point in time, 
   infinitely fine-grained, gives security managers and sysops and even
   users an incredibly powerful tool for deconstructing security events
   (e.g. log file erasures), recovering lost data, and so on and so forth. 
   These are very desireable traits, yah?  

 

Maybe a heuristic based daemon that watches the journal stream and 
creates synthetic quiesce points?

The SA would be able to leave a tape in the drive, or a DVDR in the 
drive, and the system could
periodically write out changes.

Binaries that get modified could also trigger an alarm, ala tripwire, 
etc. Depends on how people feel about
adding more metatdata to the filesystems.

Apps could periodically send a "I"m quiesced" signal to the fs as well. 
As opposed to a checkpoint signal
coming from the outside.

   --

   So why hasn't it been done or, at least, why isn't it unversal after all
   these years?
 

People afraid to work on solutions that don't fit within the existing 
problem space?

   It's a good question.  I think it comes down to how most programmers
   have been educated over the years.  Its funny, but whenever I build
   something new the first question I usually get is "what paper is your
   work based on?".  I get it every time, without fail.  And every time,
   without fail, I find myself trying to explain to the questioner that
   I generally do not bother to *READ* research papers...  that I build 
   systems from scratch based on one or two sentence's worth of concept.

   If I really want to throw someone for a loop I ask him whether he'd
   rather be the guy inventing the algorithm and writing the paper, or
   the guy implementing it from the paper.  It's a question that forces
   the questioner to actually think with his noggin.
   I think that is really the crux of the problem... programmers have been
   taught to build things from templates rather then build things from
   concepts... and THAT is primarily why software is still stuck in the 
   dark ages insofar as I am concerned.  True innovation requires having
   lightbulbs go off above your head all the time, and you don't get that
   from reading papers.  Another amusing anecdote... every time I complained
   about something in FreeBSD-5 or 6 the universal answer I got was that
   'oh, well, Solaris did it this way' or 'there was a paper about this'
   or a myrid of other 'someone else wrote it down so it must be good'
   excuses.  Not once did I ever get any other answer.  Pretty sad, I think,
   and also sadly not unique to FreeBSD.  It's a problem with mindset, and
   mindset is a problem with our educational system (the entire world's).

   I'm really happy that DragonFly has finally progressed to the point where
   we can begin to implement our loftier goals.  Up until now the work has
   been primarily ripping out and reimplementing the guts of the system with
   very little visibility poking through to the end-user.  Now we are
   are starting to push into things that have direct consequences to the
   end-user.  The journaling is one of the three major legs that will
   support the ultimate goal of single-system-image clustering.  The second
   leg is a cache coherency scheme, and the third will be resource sharing
   and migration.  All three will have to be very carefully and deliberately
   integrated together into a single whole to achieve the ultimate goal.
   This makes journaling a major turning point for the project... one,
   I hope, that attracts more people to DragonFly.
 

Hopefully the train doesn't get going so fast that people can't get on.

						-Matt