Files are fraught with peril

In this talk, we’re going to look at how file systems differ from each other and other issues we might encounter when writing to files. We’re going to look at the file “stack” starting at the top with the file API, which we’ll see is nearly impossible to use correctly and that supporting multiple filesystems without corrupting data is much harder than supporting a single filesystem; move down to the filesystem, which we’ll see has serious bugs that cause data loss and data corruption; and then we’ll look at disks and see that disks can easily corrupt data at a rate five million times greater than claimed in vendor datasheets.

Deeply technical, but well-written and pleasant to read.

3 Comments

  1. 2019-07-24 2:02 pm
    • 2019-07-24 6:06 pm
      • 2019-07-24 8:03 pm