General Development Archive

"Reiserfs is fast and reliable. The new ext3 is an easy upgrade. Both journal metadata, but ext3 journals data too, but at a big price. Which journaling filesystem is right for you?" The IDG Network discusses which Linux journaling filesystem is right for you. Our Take: Personally, I would definetely go with SGI's XFS.

With the 2.4 release of Linux come a host of new filesystem possibilities, including Reiserfs, XFS, JFS, and others. These filesystems sound cool, but what exactly can they do, what are they good at, and exactly how do you go about safely using them in a production Linux environment? Daniel Robbins answers these questions by showing you how to set up these new advanced filesystems under Linux 2.4. In this installment, Daniel takes a look at ext3, a new improved version of ext2 with journaling capabilities. Make sure you read the also incredibly interesting previous articles: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Will Dyson wrote in to inform us about the brand new version of his BFS filesystem driver for the Linux 2.4.x kernel. His code is based on Makoto Kato's original work, while there is another, older, version of a BFS driver for kernels 2.2.x already available. These drivers are all read-only and they do not (yet) expose the BeFS's advanced features like attributes and indexes.

"Most senior engineers understand the technical details about what it will take to move Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD to support enterprise computing environments. What we don't often understand is what the actual competitive advantages of open source systems are, and what the open source communities need to do to help maintain these advantages." The author explains how the two major open source development models work in different ways: the Linux and the *BSD. Read the editorial at BSDToday.

Access Control Lists (ACL) is a way to support fine-grained per-user or per-group permissions for files and directories. POSIX-like Access Control Lists are now part of many commercial UNIX systems but with these patches available, the same level of flexibility is available for Linux. Extended Attributes are arbitrary name/value pairs that are associated with files or directories. They can be used to store system objects (e.g. capabilities of executables, Access Control Lists) and user objects (e.g. the character set or mime type of a file). The patches support specific kernel versions and only the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Filesystems like SGI's XFS under Linux support extended attributes (meta-data) natively. Other operating systems that have similar meta-data support built-in to their filesystems are Windows2K/XP, BeOS and AtheOS.

Borland, will announce version 2 of its Kylix package Tuesday. Kylix, introduced in January, lets software developers write programs that can be used on Linux or Windows machines. The new version will add features that improve the product's support for Web services, a representative said. Web services move tasks that took place on a PC or a single server onto a network of servers, ZDNews reports. In other development news, Python 2.2b1 was released.

He invented the C programming language. He is one of the co-creators of Unix. He has watched more than one multi-billion dollar industry evolve around his creations. And still, Dennis Ritchie shows up for work each day in the same Murray Hill, NJ office where he and Ken Thompson first ran Unix on a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-7 back in 1969. Why? Well, it's not just any old company that employs Ritchie. This is Lucent's Bell Labs we're talking about ­ the home of the laser, the place where the transistor first saw life. It's a pretty exciting work environment, and, as Ritchie is fond of saying, it's nice to walk around your office and stumble into things like canisters of liquid helium. It was at his nondescript office, right next to where Unix was invented, that Ritchie met with Linux Magazine's Robert McMillan and Adam Goodman." More at Linux Magazine.