[Portland] PortlandVFSProposal

[Diego Calleja]

El Sat, 07 Jan 2006 23:04:23 +0100,
nf2 <nf2 at scheinwelt.at> escribió:


> I believe with FUSE many applications need to be rewritten as well, 
> because they don't expect the filesystem to be slow. With FUSE you have 
> to move all your file-operations (even a "stat" call) out of the 
> GUI-thread, because they might block for a very long time. I'd reckon 

...just like they'll do with common-vfs if they're downloading data from
internet throught a slow link. Actually, FUSE performance is quite OK, and
common-vfs will be also slower than in-kernel filesystems. When speaking
of userspace filesystems, performance is important but i wouldn't say
it's a "critical" issue...

(by the way, thanks to the composite extension these days GUI apps can
block in whatever operation they want and the X server will continue 
redrawing it, not perfect but much better than nothing. As Dimitri said,
multithreading is the right solution for programs that block on I/O and
common-vfs has the same problem with network filesystems. It's a  solved
issue for a long time - evolution and kmail don't block their whole
users interface when downloading your mail, they know how to handle
such cases correctly)