Plans for 1.8+ (2.0?)

Dmitri Nikulin dnikulin at gmail.com
Thu Feb 1 00:35:02 PST 2007


On 2/1/07, ricardo <ricardo at igotbsd.org> wrote:
On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:35:42 -0500 (EST)
"Justin C. Sherrill" <justin at shiningsilence.com> wrote:
> On Wed, January 31, 2007 3:18 pm, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> >
>
> >     I am seriously considering our options with regards to ZFS or a
> >     ZFS-like filesystem.  We clearly need something to replace UFS,
> >     but I am a bit worried that porting ZFS would be as much work
> >     as simply designing a new filesystem from scratch.
>
> One of the reasons people are so excited about ZFS is because it
> solves the problem of managing space.  Disk management is and has
> always been a pain in the rear, and ZFS goes a long way toward
> reducing that.
>
> While constructing a new filesystem will help your goals, it will also
> mean that DragonFly users miss out on having all the other advantages
> that come with ZFS.  Put another way, we're going to lose planned
> functionality.
  You're implying that ZFS=God, in other words, you're implying that
there could be no better FS that ZFS. A very obnoxious statement!
That's not his point. He means that ZFS, while very good at what it
is, would not be optimal for transparent clustering. And a file system
which is designed for clustering won't necessarily be as good as ZFS
on single machines. Either way, some use cases becomes sub-optimal,
and it's a choice of what's more important to do first.
ZFS is optimized all the way down to avoiding byte swapping with a
simple but adequate "endian adaptiveness" technique, and being as new
as it is, it still has a few years worth of optimization potential.
It's definitely not going to perform as well on DragonFly as it does
on Solaris for a long time, but it could still be better than UFS by
design alone. Any optimization over that is just a bonus.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced there's a need to make a new
filesystem just for clustering, not just yet anyway. How about 9P?
It's not like clustering is a brand new problem, it's had decades of
research applied and there is no shortage of work to reference until
it's practical to attempt to do better.
---
Dmitri Nikulin
Centre for Synchrotron Science
Monash University
Victoria 3800, Australia




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