Linux Summit Will Preview New Advanced File System
Linked by Rahul on Mon 13th Oct 2008 21:19 UTC
Linux Linux Foundation is organizing a end user collaboration summit this week. A major topic will be a presentation on the new upcoming filesystems - Ext4 and Btrfs. Ted Tso, who is a Linux kernel filesystem developer on a sabbatical from IBM working for Linux Foundation for a year, has talked about the two-pronged approach for the Linux kernel, taking a incremental approach with Ext4 while simultaneously working on the next generation filesystem called btrfs. Read more for details.
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Phobos
Member since:
2008-04-30

"1) file systems do not follow Moore's Law...

The article didn't say that it did, but Moore's Law has allowed people to do things with their storage devices where filesystems and storage containers like LVM and RAID haven't haven't quite kept up. That was the point the article was making. "

the article said:
The problem with contemporary file systems, Ts'o said, is that -- following Moore's Law -- file sizes have grown bigger, and disk drives have doubled in capacity every couple of years.


so, indeed, it did say FS followed Moore's Law... try proof reading next time.

Moore's Law was about the growth of the number of transistor on a CPU die... people mistakenly extrapolated that to everything, being a wrong assumption at it's root.

Hmmmmmmm, no. Some people want to believe that, but it isn't true I'm afraid. For the vast majority of storage uses in the world today, and when you look at reviews of OpenSolaris, no one is the slightest bit interested in ZFS or even aware that it exists.


So, you need proof, eh?

- Linus Torvalds:
And yes, maybe ZFS is worthwhile enough that I'm willing to go to the effort of trying to relicense the kernel. But quite frankly, I can almost guarantee that Sun won't release ZFS under the GPLv3 even if they release other parts.

http://lwn.net/Articles/237905/

- Zemlin's desperate and groundless attacks like:
With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features


while later stating:
Zemlin suggests that it should make ZFS and DTrace available under a Linux-compatible license.


(So minor he wants it on Linux so badly?... A bit contradictory, isn't it?)
http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574CE00371FE1.htm...

- Apple: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/technology/filesystem.html

- FreeBSD: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-April/07054...

- ZFS-on-FUSE: http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/

Not only that everybody wants it, it also has inspired other works like Mathew Dillon's HAMMER: http://kerneltrap.org/DragonFlyBSD/HAMMER_Filesystem_Design

While desktop users don't know/don't care about FSs, whenever they buy a Mac or install Solaris or FreeBSD, they will get ZFS, and they don't ever need to know about their existence... that's the point of it, FSs should be transparent to end users...



It makes certain things somewhat better, but Sun unfortunately don't have the userland tools that would expose ZFS as something remotely useful for the majority.


Heh... investigate a little before doing such assertions: http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs


In summary, no one is going to rush off their existing platform to get ZFS and btrfs (a select few might). Filesystems tend to change slowly, and adoption happens in the normal course of other things, normal iterative development and the price of upheaval.


I think my previous list can prove you wrong.


Sorry, but no it wouldn't. It has a great deal of useful features, but for a filesystem, it consumes far too much memory and CPU without some pretty damn serious tuning. It certainly isn't a general purpose filesystem you can throw any workload at.


You see, ZFS was designed taking in account the vast percentage of wasted CPU cycles on modern servers and computers in general... same thing that has motivated virtualization on all platforms, in modern times there is an excess of processing power, not lack of it like 20 years ago. The whole idea of hardware disk controllers to make disks arrays has become obsolete in many (save some very specialized) cases, thanks to ZFS... I invite you to read some papers and the ideas behind the Thumper X4500... a storage solution using ZFS

Even so, ZFS is no so massively resource intensive as you seem to imply, it just need a decent (not even great) configuration based on modern modern standards and it works like a charm...

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