Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 14th Oct 2007 14:52 UTC, submitted by Oliver
BSD and Darwin derivatives Matthew Dillon writes: "I am going to start committing bits and pieces of the HAMMER filesystem over the next two months. Note that the filesystem will not be operational until we get closer to the 2.0 release in December so these bits and pieces will not be tied into buildworld/buildkernel until then." Features: maximum size of half an exabyte, infinite snapshots, limited only by retention policy, streaming backups, asynchronous transactional support (no long fscks to check disk state). Dillon also explains why he chose not to use Sun's ZFS.
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RE: Honk! Honk!
by dekernel on Sun 14th Oct 2007 16:12 UTC in reply to "Honk! Honk!"
dekernel
Member since:
2005-07-07

On face value you might appear to be correct, but you have forgotten an important point. Matt is sitting in a very unique position when it comes to implementing this. He has free access to make the changes necessary in any part of the system he needs without much worry of requiring or maintaining backwards compatibility. Make no mistake, that can make all the difference when it comes to implementing such deep-rooted technologies quickly.

I also believe that this type of "filesystem" (I put quotes because this level of functionality goes far beyond a typical filesystem) has been his goal since the inception of DragonFlyBSD so all of the work to date has been done to facilitate the addition of HAMMER.

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RE[2]: Honk! Honk!
by kaiwai on Sun 14th Oct 2007 16:48 in reply to "RE: Honk! Honk!"
kaiwai Member since:
2005-07-06

On face value you might appear to be correct, but you have forgotten an important point. Matt is sitting in a very unique position when it comes to implementing this. He has free access to make the changes necessary in any part of the system he needs without much worry of requiring or maintaining backwards compatibility. Make no mistake, that can make all the difference when it comes to implementing such deep-rooted technologies quickly.


And more importantly, the situation he is in, he doesn't have to contend with the office politics with marketing breathing down the programmers necks to implement zyx feature because it has foobah buzzword.

ZFS is also very much in its infancy; this isn't a bash against it, but having had a look at the various bugs that have come up regarding it, I'd sooner feel more comfortable sticking with something like UFS.

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RE[3]: Honk! Honk!
by Oliver on Sun 14th Oct 2007 18:01 in reply to "RE[2]: Honk! Honk!"
Oliver Member since:
2006-07-15

ZFS is in operation since about 2003 by Sun. Some big companies and universities are using it already for servers. Maybe not as bullet-proof as UFS, but ready for prime-time.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 7