
Half billion tries for a HAMMER2 bug - zdw
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/06/20/21411.html
======
nayuki
The link in the article (
[http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2018-May/672...](http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2018-May/672263.html)
) is more helpful than the article itself.

> I am somewhat tickled by the notion that you might have a problem after
> deleting half a billion directory entries.

What's wrong with performing 500 million operations on a file system? There is
an expectation of very high reliability when it comes to file systems.

~~~
paulmd
> What's wrong with performing 500 million operations on a file system? There
> is an expectation of very high reliability when it comes to file systems.

And that's why my take for Hammer2 has been: sounds great, but there's not
enough usage to shake out the bugs. DragonflyBSD is a 1% of the BSD community,
which is like 5% of the total *nix deploys. ZFS has trillions of hours of
drive-time. What does Hammer2 have? A great developer? Everyone knows one
great developer isn't enough, there are bugs there and not enough usage to
shake them out. He could be Actual Literal Jesus and he would still write a
small minority of unpredictable, difficult-to-diagnose bugs that have to be
sterilized out of the code.

(as a total nobody, on my part - it's just not good enough for even casual
usage vs the competition here)

~~~
unixhero
At this stage DragonFlyBSD is a research OS and is not attempting to compete
against anyone. It exists and innovates, that's what Matt does here. It is
enjoyable to use as well!

------
chaz6
I am grateful that this kind of testing occurs for the benefit of end users. 1
in half a billion (or milliard if you are old English) is not acceptable with
the speed that modern computers run.

