Linked by Rahul on Mon 13th Oct 2008 21:19 UTC
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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RE[5]: mistakes, assumptions, extrapolations
by sbergman27 on Tue 14th Oct 2008 21:33
in reply to "RE[4]: mistakes, assumptions, extrapolations"
Member since:2005-07-24
I wonder if they simply licensed it under the GPL, without making any other changes to it, your attitude would change.
License compatibility would make an in-kernel implementation of ZFS *possible*. But there would be many other problems. ZFS clashes rather violently with Linux Kernel design philosophy. ("Rampant layering violation" was the term Andrew Morton chose for it while *praising* its feature set.) It's hard to see ZFS making it into mainline in a recognizable form, licensing issues asside. Far more likely, ZFS concepts will make it into Linux via btrfs.
More generally, I've never felt that the GPL/CDDL licensing issues were that significant. The Linux and Solaris kernel internals are so different that the sharing and cross-pollination of *concepts* is more useful than the sharing of actual code.
Edited 2008-10-14 21:34 UTC
RE[5]: mistakes, assumptions, extrapolations
by segedunum on Tue 14th Oct 2008 21:36
in reply to "RE[4]: mistakes, assumptions, extrapolations"
Member since:2005-07-06
You are far too dismissive of ZFS; I wonder if they simply licensed it under the GPL, without making any other changes to it, your attitude would change.
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.
The constant attempt to prove ZFS is irrelevant or worthless invariably seem to come from hardcore Linux/GPL advocates.
This is an article about possible future Linux filesystems (apart from ext4). Take a look at the first post ;-).
If ZFS, precisely as it exists now, came from the GNU/Linux community all the other non GPL open source projects and particularly the Microsofties would not hear the end of it.
No I'm sorry, but people just don't get that excited about filesystems. ext4 and Btrfs are attempts at trying to move some shortcomings on, but new filesystems are not big bang events and don't generate a lot of default excitement that some people think that ZFS automatically should.
Linux had some excitement over Reiser4 and what might be possible, but the vast majority simply could not stomach yet another completely incompatible filesystem change and another reformat no matter how great the new features were. Microsoft even had to make NTFS upgradeable from FAT, which just shows you. It's the main reason why ext has become the pre-eminent filesystem in the Linux world, despite some shortcomings. It remains to be seen how Btrfs fairs on that front and how long it will take to get a reasonable installed base, regardless of how good it might be in the future. Inertia is deep when it comes to storage.
RE[6]: mistakes, assumptions, extrapolations
by Arun on Tue 14th Oct 2008 23:00
in reply to "RE[5]: mistakes, assumptions, extrapolations"
Member since:2005-07-07
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This is an article about possible future Linux filesystems (apart from ext4). Take a look at the first post ;-).
May be the next time you post on Solaris articles you should too.
No I'm sorry, but people just don't get that excited about filesystems. ext4 and Btrfs are attempts at trying to move some shortcomings on, but new filesystems are not big bang events and don't generate a lot of default excitement that some people think that ZFS automatically should.
Yes they do.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/10/10/success-with-opensolaris-zf...
Edited 2008-10-14 23:00 UTC
Member since:
2008-03-15
You are far too dismissive of ZFS; I wonder if they simply licensed it under the GPL, without making any other changes to it, your attitude would change. The constant attempt to prove ZFS is irrelevant or worthless invariably seem to come from hardcore Linux/GPL advocates. If ZFS, precisely as it exists now, came from the GNU/Linux community all the other non GPL open source projects and particularly the Microsofties would not hear the end of it.