InternetNews talks to developers and vendors about the rise of Btrfs as a successor to Ext4. Though Ext4 adds extents, Chris Mason, Btrfs developer noted that BTRFS adds a number of other features beyond that. Among those features are items like snapshotting, online file consistency checks and the ability to perform fast incremental backups. BTRFS (pronounced better FS) is currently under development in an effort led by Oracle engineer Chris Mason. With the support of Intel, Red Hat, HP, IBM, BTRFS could become the engine that brings next generation filesystem capabilities to Linux.
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Member since:2005-07-06
ZFS is licensed under CDDL. This license is GPL incompatible and apparently deliberately designed to be so, because some of Sun folks were worried about losing their technology to Linux and some developers threatened to quit if their work was put under GPL (by far the most used foss license. refer http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html ).
You can find a reference in this video linked from
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/09/msg00002.html
Linux developers cannot possibly just take code and ignore the licensing incompatibility. So they are being prudent and implementing things from scratch in Linux taking advantage of existing Linux kernel API including the vfs and block layer. Yes, it is unfortunate that license incompatibility between free and open source software prevents it from being reused but when vendors do it deliberately, not much can be done about it
Member since:2006-01-14
Member since:2005-07-09
But BTRFS developers *are* implementing what their users want. Look at all the companies involved. Linux has a different user base than Solaris and as such, have different priority. In the Solaris world, staying with the same OS version for 10 years is not unusual. In the Linux world, staying with the same OS version for 4 years is. Neither OS is wrong for its focus. They just fill different niches.
Member since:2006-01-02
Member since:2006-05-02
Interesting information. I believe you mean "externally" instead of "eternally", right? Any idea how this myth (that Windows contained BSD networking code) came about?
Member since:
2005-07-06
Right on! It's exactly these things that make the Linux community look childish and ignorant of other proven technologies. Until they get over themselves and start implementing what their users (not only developers!) want, Linux will always remain a niche, at least in the desktop arena.
Then again, this happens to all O.S. to some degree. I still can't understand why Microsoft has taken a perfectly good-working TCP/IP stack from BSD and botched it up with inefficient, proprietary code and implemented that mess in Vista...