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JFS May Make It Into 2.4

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the is-like-the-diary-of-robinson-crusoe? dept.

Grimsaado writes: "LinuxWorld has an article on IBM's JFS and how it might be included in 2.4 as well as some technical fluff on it's phenominal cosmic power." Heck, with the number of journaling file systems, it's like being at a file system buffet at this point.

10 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Reiserfs, journalling only part of the picture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5
    The ReiserFS really rocks, but journalling is only secondary. The ReiserFS is much more than a journalling filesystem. It is supposed to ultimately be some sort of object oriented user-configurable file system with personality plug-ins and all sorts of bells and whistles. Me, I'm only interested in the journalling aspects at present. It is rock solid now and I won't go back to ext2 anytime soon. The only thing I miss with ReiserFS is extended attributes like immutable and append-only. These are planned for a future release of ReiserFS, however.

    If Linus has a problem with ReiserFS, it is that he probably fears some of the exciting new ``disruptive'' concepts that Hans Reiser has planned. ReiserFS is truly innovative. For those interested in the innovations, there is a White Paper available. I'm sure that Hans Reiser's roadmap is what is scaring Linus. I'll be happy to see JFS make it into 2.4, but ResierFS deserves to be there too. I urge anyone with a slight interest to try out ReiserFS. I'm sure you'll agree then that it deserves a place at the table. I'm a late adaptor, and skeptical of new code (I used Xia FS for years after ext2 was available). If conservative old me can handle ReiserFS, anyone can.

    1. Re:Reiserfs, journalling only part of the picture by Noodles · · Score: 4

      Thanks, Hans.

    2. Re:Reiserfs, journalling only part of the picture by kzinti · · Score: 4

      Thanks, Hans.

      <Grin>.

      But seriously: that AC was right. ReiserFS is more than just a journaling filesystem, and it's rock solid. I started using it on my laptop as a patch applied to my 2.2 kernel. I had also been using Suse's USB backport patch, but it was crashing my laptop (some kind of interaction with APM), and I got tired of waiting for 8GB of ext2fs partitions to fsck.

      Under normal operation, the ReiserFS is fast and reliable. In fact, most of the time I forget that there's anything special about the filesystem. In recovering from a crash, though, the reisers really shine -- they recover nearly instantly. Only once have I ever lost data: my battery ran down, and a file I had been editing was empty after I restarted the laptop. But even this may not have been the fault of the filesystem; the laptop may have powered down at just the wrong time during the file-save cycle, just after ftruncate, but before any data had been written.

      Anyway, journaling filesystems are not magic -- they can lose data. Read that again: they can lose data, just like any filesystem. They just recover much faster because they guarantee the integrity of the metadata.

      Bottom line: ReiserFS gets two thumbs up. Highly recommended if you're not afraid of patching your kernel.

      --Jim

  2. Doh! by Greyfox · · Score: 4
    Disclaimer: Since the article is slashdotted, I haven't had a chance to read it yet. That being said...

    Sure, let's just piss in Hans Reiser's petunias. A lot of people I've talked to seem to thing that Reiserfs is the farthest along journaling filesystem and I'm sure including some other journaling filesystem in 2.4 would be a major poke in the eye for him.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  3. No it won't. by shippo · · Score: 4
    Adding any journalled filesystem to the existing kernel requires significant changes at the VFS layer. Making such a change has the potential of breaking other things, particularly other file-systems. Every current filesystem will have to be rechecked - not a simple task as some don't have full-time maintainers.

    The current 2.4.0-test kernel is getting very close, and Linus now appears to be only accepting bug-fixes and the odd self-contained driver. There is no way such fundamental changes could go in now.

  4. Re:Kernel Archives by shaggykl · · Score: 5
    I'm from IBM.

    As previously stated JFS is released under GPL.

    AIX's JFS contains licensed code from outside sources. Several years ago, JFS was redesigned from the ground up for OS/2 Warp Server. This version does not contain any encumbered code and was designed to be more scalable than AIX's version. This JFS first shipped last year with Warp Server for e-Business.

    Therefore, the Linux offering of JFS is not the same filesystem you'll find on AIX, and you won't be able to share a JFS file system between AIX and Linux. (You will be able to share one between Linux and Warp Server.)

  5. Buffet.. by TheTomcat · · Score: 4

    Heck, with the number of journaling file systems, it's like being at a file system buffet at this point.

    Mmmmm.. all you can eat inodes.

  6. ReiserFS in RedHat by NetJunkie · · Score: 4

    Someone has changed RedHat 7.0 to allow you to install ReiserFS during boot.

    http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br

  7. well, there's one FS I won't configure by jetson123 · · Score: 5
    I was using JFS under AIX for several years. I can't imagine why people would want to run it. It doesn't give you much more data security (only file system structure is journalled), and you pay a heavy price in terms of performance. In fact, running Linux and AIX side-by-side for several years, Linux with ext2 on a low-end IDE drive not only greatly out-performed AIX on a high-end workstation and SCSI drive, AIX even lost a file system during a crash.

    Fsck on ext2 is pretty fast, crashes are very rare for server systems, and servers require regular backups anyway. It is more rational to run integrity checks in batch mode when necessary than to pay overhead on every file system access to deal with the possibility that the machine might crash at any moment. I think JFS (and its companion, LVM) are simply not good engineering tradeoffs for most (all?) applications.

  8. Standard OpenSource Advocate response... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4
    If you think that the 2.4 kernel is 'long overdue' then why don't you volunteer and help out the effort? That's the benefit of Open Source Software, whenever someone makes a negative statement about the software, then one gets to tell them to 'work on it themselves'. it doesn't matter if you are busy, employed, don't know C or C++, or that the person telling you this has never even seen the kernel source code. They get to tell you to fix your problem yourself.

    Isn't Open Source wonderful?