Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Jun 2008 14:12 UTC, submitted by diegocg
HP has announced that they will open source the AdvFS under the second version of the GPL. AdvFS is a mid-90's file system that is used by the Tru64 UNIX operating system. The Wikipedia page on AdvFS provides the necessary background information and feature set of the AdvFS file system.
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Member since:
2006-01-19
It's because, sadly, this is too late. If HP had done this 3 to 5 years ago, say when they canned the HP-UX port, ZFS would have been less exciting as open source.
ZFS passingly resembles NetApp's WAFL, too. The difference is availability, not the buzz word, but the fact that it is here, it works, and anyone is allowed to use it for free. The same argument that people use for Linux all the time.
Storage management is my favorite part of UNIX. But even I recognize two things: 'Works reliably' is the best feature, and selling storage management for UNIX in a closed model is so 1995, when AdvFS and XFS were new and exciting. ZFS works and it's not closed. WAFL works, but it's closed, and AdvFS is open, but it doesn't work (on linux).
This is really cool, I hope someone ports it, and I will enjoy perusing the code. But if HP really wanted to do something serious for linux storage, they would release the Polyserve code they bought.