While Ext4 was originally merged in 2.6.19, it was marked as a development filesystem. It has been a long time coming but as planned, Ext4dev has been renamed to Ext4 in 2.6.28 to indicate its level of maturity and paving the way for production level deployments. Ext4 filesystem developer Ted Tso also endorsed Btrfs as a multi-vendor, next generation filesystem and along with the interest from Andrew Morton, Btrfs is planned to be merged before 2.6.29 is released. It will follow a similar development process to Ext4 and be initially marked as development only.
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Member since:2005-07-24
Indeed. The hardware should guarantee correctness and throw an error. In fact, I believe that it already does sector CRCs. (I distinctly rememer that my Seagate ST- 4096 80MB drive did this back in the late 80s. A CRC-11 IIRC.) It may well be that the CRC is too short to be effective on today's hardware, but that can be remedied. Why are we going out of our way to let the hardware manufacturers off the hook for selling what can only reasonably be described as defective hardware? (Hi, Western Digital! You lead the pack on this.) While I respect the ZFS feature set, I can't help but feel that some people are so caught up in the "ZFS is cool!" mindset that they fail to recognize where it is actually taking us a step backwards.
Edited 2008-10-20 14:56 UTC
Member since:
2005-12-31
Again: Why? Error correction is a simple but time-consuming task that can easily be done by the disk hardware (i.e. a co-processor). There's no point in moving it to the filesystem layer - that would hurt performance because then the CPU had to do it, and not bring any advantage (at least I cannot see any advantage).
Edited 2008-10-20 11:39 UTC