Over at IsComputerOn, an article discusses with Axel Dörfler, the Haiku move for the FreeBSD network stack. Also talked about is the thought of using ReiserFS instead of BFS.
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Member since:2005-07-11
The maker of BFS has worked for SGI, Be, Google, QNX, and is currently at Apple. I.e., he's no sub par programmer.
http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/
I believe OpenBFS was made possible in part by his book "Practical File System Design with the Be File System" and whatever necessary reverse engineering.
Anyway, let the future come as it may.
Member since:2005-07-06
No doubt. I have his book. However, note that his work at Google, QNX, and Apple all occurred after BFS was designed, and IIRC, he didn't work on XFS at SGI. But that's completely besides the point. The question is how much original design work went into BFS. If you read the book itself, you'll see that BFS was designed in fairly serious haste. If you read the book, you'll see that he mentions that BFS was designed, implemented, and tested in ten months. That means that, at most, a few months of design work went into it.
ReiserFS and BFS were started around the same time: 1996-1997. The main difference is that ReiserFS has been continually developed by Namesys ever since then, while no information about the design of BFS ever left Be since 1999 (when Practical Filesystem Design) was written.
If you actually look at the design of BFS, these facts are plain to see. BFS is an excellent design for a traditional filesystem. However, algorithmically, its more at the level of ext3 than reiser4.
Member since:
2005-07-06
The Reiser4 team is probably as big as the entire Haiku kernel team, and is led by a guy whose spent the last decade working on filesystems. Sun offered him the job to architect their new filesystem, and he turned it down so he could work on Linux. That's one heck of a steep hill to climb. I don't want to put words in their mouth, but if I were in the same position, I'd try to take advantage of that already-available work. Certainly, there are more interesting things to do in Haiku than to try and one-up a filesystem design that is already pretty damn good.