Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 4th Nov 2009 16:48 UTC
Linux continues to innovate in the area of file systems. It supports the largest variety of file systems of any operating system. It also provides cutting-edge file system technology. Two new file systems that are making their way into Linux include the NiLFS(2) log-structured file system and the exofs object-based storage system. Discover the purpose behind these two new file systems and the advantages that they bring.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
But for these filesystems, I would love to see them in production. The only problem is that it takes at least 6-7 years to develop a filesystem. It is much more tricky than develop a kernel. If you mess up the kernel, you loose a couple of hours of work, maybe. If you mess up the filesystem, you can loose several years of work. Filesystems are the nervous system, the skeleton of OS. Therefore I doubt BTRFS will make it on time. It looks like a good ZFS copy, but it will take several years more for it to be used in production. Even ZFS has bugs, 7-8 years later. And everyone agrees that SUNs engineers are very good and innovative, they produce hot tech that everyone wants.
But, I would like to see these filesystems to happen. It would only make ZFS better, becuase competition is good for everyone. The products get better, the users will benefit. And if these filesystems turn out to be better than ZFS, I will switch immediately. Why, I know OpenSolaris, it is very similar to Linux. It costs me almost nothing to relearn. OTOH, To go from Win7 to OpenVMS would take much effort.
The problem I have with OpenSolaris is the horrible hardware support, for example, Broadcom 43XX support (from Broadcom themselves) is out in the form of a operating system agnostic hybrid driver and yet has not be ported to OpenSolaris by Sun programmers - one of the most common wireless chipsets out there along with the Intel wireless chipsets. Then there is the issue of HAL being replaced and Sun programmers being caught with their pants down - what are they putting up as a replacement? I see no open discussion about the replacement beyond a couple of people putting out the idea of using a combination of libdevinfo and libsysevent but nothing has developed beyond that. Then there is the issue of making the kernel ticklesss but next to nothing has been done of any sizeable degree to push down power usage and improve battery life on laptops.
If you're talking about OpenSolaris in the capacity of a server - no problems but out side of a large scale server OpenSolaris leaves a lot to be desired. What Linux has is the ability to scale from laptop to desktop to server - I simply don't see that happening in the OpenSolaris world; I see an operating system hobbling along struggling to remain relevant when all the competition has zoomed ahead in leaps and bounds.
Edited 2009-11-05 02:18 UTC