Filesystems

[Tomas Bodzar]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 2:15 AM, David Crosswell
<david.crosswell2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, I understand that. I'm looking forward to doing something with
> Hammer, but I've spoken to a couple of guys at the local Users group
> who swear they'll never use anything else but ZFS - got it running on
> FreeBSD and I looked at Dragonfly with UFS and Hammer and thought with
> ZFS they'd have every scenario covered.

Which version of  Hammer was that? ;-) (in their "test"). Hammer has
functions which are not in ZFS and are superb and Matt described quite
well in one post why RAID is not catch all solution.

With  ZFS they depend on Oracle as it's released under CDDL and there
are clauses which Oracle can use to close all ZFS ports if they  wants
(for example when it will start to be  too much big concurrent for
their own system). Anyway what  are your options with ZFS -

1) Solaris with price from 1000$/socket/year without license it's
unusable and just crazy people use systems without patches/updates in
production connected to Internet

2) Illumos/OpenIndiana is good alternative and has some big companies
behind to be able so stay somewhat resistent to Oracle

3) FreeBSD probably best port outside of  Solaris, but main porter
died (sad) and he was great regarding internals so it's quite harder
now for them

4)  Linux with some module or through FUSE. Can't be in kernel because
 of license and they don't care anymore as there is btrfs already

5) NetBSD  still unusable, a lot of panics  and  long way ahead

>
> Linux is working to incorporate ZFS compatibility into the kernel, and
> even with various filesystem developers looking at substantial jail
> sentences for killing their wives, they've still got an over abundance
> of filesystems.

see 4) above, ReiserFS is maintained quite well by community.  What's
the point to have all available filesystems  included in some  OS?  Of
course except of bigger mess in some systems ;-) MS-DOS for
compatibility on USB flash disk or memory cards, NTFS for
compatibility with Windows and iso9660/udf for CD/DVD media. Now about
filesystems for disks in PCs/servers

1) ext2/3/4 for simplicity you can say that all are same
2) XFS
3) ReiserFS
4) ffs/ufs versions 1 and 2 and their brother HFS in Apple

That's all because  even those journaled filesystems are same/similar
regard the design. Why it doesn't matter how much of those fs is
supported in some OS?  Because all of them are old by design and
needs for modern storage. That's  why ZFS/Hammer/btrfs born so you
must care  about those regarding feature and you can't care about
those  which are not in kernel because  of speed and other issues via
FUSE,  Puffs,  module or whatever which are fine for tests only. So
you will end with what? Solaris, Ilumos/OI, FreeBSD for ZFS,
DragonFlyBSD for Hammer and btrfs for Linux


>
> It's going to have to wait for a while before I learn C then.

You don't need to know C to start learning ZFS/Hammer/btrfs all you
need is a system (eg. in VM)  which has mature implementation to play
around with that and read man pages, papers, whatever.

> Regards,
>
> David Crosswell.
>
>
> On 23/04/2011, Justin Sherrill <justin at shiningsilence.com> wrote:
>> It's certainly possible.  Nobody's working on it right now, to my
>> knowledge.  I'm more interesting in seeing Hammer grow, so I'm not
>> that concerned about it.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 5:03 PM, David Crosswell
>> <david.crosswell2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I understand the availability of UFS and Hammer in the Dragonfly
>>> environment, but is ZFS possible, or are there any plans to facilitate it
>>> if
>>> it isn't?
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> David Crosswell.
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> In a world without walls and fences, what need have we for Windows or
>>> Gates?
>>> http://www.weavers-web.org
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
>
>  In a world without walls and fences, what need have we for Windows or
> Gates?
> http://www.weavers-web.org
>
>