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Welcome to thunk.org
Personal blog · thunk.org/tytso/blogsystemsprogramming
Welcome to thunk.org is a personal blog at thunk.org about systems and programming. Since 2008, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “Android will be using ext4 starting with Gingerbread”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Theodore Ts'o's blog for his file system and storage posts, such as the 2009 fsync and SSD write pieces, and his early licensing proposal. Commenters cite these as background, without judging them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /tytso/blog/2009/03/12/delayed-allocation-and-the-zero-length-file-problem/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-05-31
- Android will be using ext4 starting with Gingerbread2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-13
What Hacker News says?
> Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o ( https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.ed ...) that is interesting to read. Although it starts on a polarising note ("thin blue line") Can I say that I was immediately put off by the author conflating the "thin blue line" quote from with a political orientation? The full quote (from the article) being: "Later in that thread, another major maintainer uniron…
Comment linking /tytso/
on “Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead”Submitted Google has a problem retaining great engineers? Bullcrap. as a story · 88 points
HN discussionWar story time. File based encryption[1] (which used ext4 encryption) was supposed to have been released with Android M. It slipped by a full year because of this issue which Linus identified. At the time, we didn't have xfstests ported over so it could run in an Android/Bionic environment. So the only way I could test it was by taking the SOC kernel to which we had backported ext4 encryption, bashing it hard enough…
Comment linking /android-xfstests
on “Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space”Submitted Android will be using ext4 starting with Gingerbread as a story · 33 points
HN discussionTheodore Ts'o wrote about a similar Firefox issue back in 2009: https://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/
Comment linking /tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/
on “Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox”Submitted Theodore Ts'o: Aligning filesystems to an SSD’s erase block size as a story · 15 points
HN discussionThe Android AOSP android-common kernel tree builds just fine on x86. The Qualcomm Android BSP 3.10 kernel didn't, and I had to do a huge amount of bashing and fixups before it finally could build on x86 (at least with a minimum configuration so I could run file system regression tests, since this was before android-xfstests[1] was a thing). [1] https://thunk.org/android-xfstests
Comment linking /android-xfstests
on “Broadcom Offers $105B for Qualcomm in Landmark Deal”Submitted The Transitive Grace Period Public Licence as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI have found a blog post from 2009 about this issue[1]. I think the "recent Ubuntu bug [that] has gotten slashdotted" is [2], so I think the most technical discussion about this would be [2]. I also found an interesting "scar tissue" from that bug in the current ext4 docs[0]: "If auto_da_alloc is enabled, ext4 will detect the replace-via-rename and replace-via-truncate patterns and force that any delayed allocation…
Comment linking /tytso/blog/2009/03/12/delayed-allocation-and-the-zero-length-file-problem/
on “Don't defer Close() on writable files (2017)”Submitted Is Nokia Doomed? (2010) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI always thought Unix v7+ should have added some kind way to do atomic groups of syscalls, eg: begin_transaction (); lstat ("/path", ...); lstat ("/path/foo", ...); commit (); In Unix v7 mkdir was not a system call. It was a setuid program implemented using mknod + link. That was racy so the mkdir(2) system call was added. But it could have been solved more generally (and more elegantly) by adding transactions. It c…
Comment linking /tytso/blog/2009/03/12/delayed-allocation-and-the-zero-length-file-problem/
on “The trouble with symbolic links”Submitted Android will use ext4 starting with Gingerbread as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI always thought it would be a good idea for system calls to support transactions. Probably in a limited way because implementing general transactions would require massive changes to the kernel. But it would be nice to be able to do [error checking omitted]: begin (); fp = fopen ("file", "w"); fputs (content, fp); fclose (fp); commit (); It could solve the whole thing with ending up with zero-length files because y…
Comment linking /tytso/blog/2009/03/12/delayed-allocation-and-the-zero-length-file-problem/
on “Things Unix can do atomically (2010)”Submitted Reflections on a complaint from a frustrated git user as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI made a very similar proposal back in 2003, which I called the Temporary Proprietary License, or TPL: https://thunk.org/tytso/TPL.html
Comment linking /tytso/TPL.html
on “GPL Time Bomb – an interesting approach to FOSS licensing”Submitted Theodore T'so: Don't fear the fsync as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat simply is not true. Chromebooks, many Android phones (all of the ones sold by Google) have a way of turning off the requirement for signed boot. The device is less secure if you disable signed boot; an evil maid who gains access to your device, or the FBI after they seize your device, will have a much easier time getting access to your data --- but if you want to build your own version of Chromium, or put your…
Comment linking /android-xfstests
on “We Love GPLv3, but Are Switching License to Apache 2.0”Submitted Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'll admit the pull request was a little marginal for patches that would be landing in -rc4, which is roughly halfway through the development cycle. That being said, all of the patches got independent review (none of them were authored by me, and I reviewed them all before accepting them). I also ran the tests through a very extensive regression test suite. ( https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests ). So even though many of…
Comment linking /gce-xfstests
on “Torvalds: I've pulled this, but if problems, ext4 is going on my shit-list”Submitted Is the Linux community watching a setting Sun? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSeems to exist since 2010: https://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2010/01/20/the-transitive-grace... Originals version of the license: http://zooko.com/tgppl.html Seems like the goal was to keep the product under copyright for some time, giving it a opportunity to recover costs or integrated exclusively inside a product for a while, giving some advantage over competitors, but making it a public-license after the period. Also…
Comment linking /tytso/blog/2010/01/20/the-transitive-grace-period-public-licence-good-ideas-come-around/
on “Zfec – Efficient, portable erasure coding tool”Submitted What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA number of Linux kernel developers have been working with a subset of the Usenix FAST (File systems and Storage Technologies) community. We hold a Linux FAST workshop after the FAST conference for the past few years. A few years back, some of the researchers (professors and graduate students) claimed they were interested in more testing and possibly taking some of their work (Betrfs[1], specifically), and productio…
Comment linking /gce-xfstests
on “Ask HN: What’s the biggest difference between professional coding and academia?”There's no such thing as "optimizing for ssds" [1] That's simply irresponsible development practices. [1] https://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/22/should-filesystems-b...
Comment linking /tytso/blog/2009/02/22/should-filesystems-be-optimized-for-ssds/
on “WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward”
