SGI Releases XFS For 2.3.99pre2

Everybody and Their Dog writes, "SGI announced the availability of XFS for linux 2.3.99pre2, via their CVS. Timely in light of the Journaling ReiserFS controversy, and ext3 delays. " A lot of people sent this in -- good to see SGI following through on their promise.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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Journalling Filesystems Wars, The Saga Continues

[jd]

We now have FOUR (count them!) journalling file systems. This makes it more journalled than Peypes Diary.

So far, we have:

• ReiserFS - with no less than two hashing functions, now. Reasonably stable, and I've never lost any data under it, except once, when I mounted a journalled reiserfs partition using a non-journalling version of reiserfs. It mangled the partition to the point where neither I, nor the developers, could fix it. It's ingenious, and novel, but it's far from being an athletic sprinter in terms of development. But as complex projects go, it's still a very impressive demonstration of Open Source development. It does have one serious glitch - IIRC, it won't work with RAID or LVM. At least, earlier versions didn't. The journal would be corrupted, IIRC, because it assumed the ReiserFS partition existed as one physical unit. (Please, if anyone knows more, feel free to correct me on that.)
• Ext3fs - Progressing with the lightning speed of a concussed tortoise on LSD. Ext3 is a great idea, in theory, as it's backwards compatiable with Ext2. However, unless it picks up speed, we won't be seeing the next patch until well into the next decade. I know Alan Cox is busy, and only has one brain (the size of a planet), but if he's having problems with working on it, what's stopping him putting it on SourceForge and using it to build interest and developers?
• IBM's JFS - IBM have followed the 386BSD model, AFAICT, in that they released a working base and have been adding, debugging and patching from there. This kind of layer-on-layer development can produce a good product more quickly (in theory) than vertical construction (see XFS), but it also tends to drag in crud, as getting the layers to mesh can be a royal bugbear.
• SGI's XFS - SGI have followed closer to the model used with the Linux kernel - developing working subsystems and adding them in. This gives you less crud, but also gives you a slower start, as it takes longer to reach a point of being able to do anything "useful".

All the above systems, with the possible exception of ext3fs, journal ONLY metadata. IIRC, ext3fs journals everything.

Between support for RAID, LVM's and journalling, Linux is industrial strength, as far as filesystems go. It's the match of any commercial system, now.

What we need now, though, is some kind of mandatory access control system. (See the Ask Slashdot column.) I've been thinking hard about that, and it should be possible to implement with code already in existance. With that, Linux'll have everything needed to be a practical system in everything from small office to top security establishments.