Re: Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?

On Mon, 12 May 2025 21:50:02 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

But the drive also knows things about the data that the OS can't know
(things that have to do with the physical location of the data on the
platters).

No it doesn’t. Consider a journalling filesystem, where the journal entry
must be written first before the actual filesystem update. If the drive
reorders the writes to do the latter first, there go your filesystem
integrity guarantees.

More reliable, I don't know: to get comparable performance, you'll need
comparable complexity ...

Fewer layers ⇒ less complexity.

- Those "few filesystems" aren't nearly good enough to compete with
  a normal filesystem running on top of a typical SSD.  Simply because
  those filesystems have not been designed for those kinds of uses.

Of course they are. You don’t think there are filesystem experts working
on the Linux kernel?