BSD Journaled File System Ready For Testing

Dan writes "The Journaled File System for FreeBSD (JFS4BSD) Project has the goal of porting the JFS Technology from IBM/Linux to FreeBSD. It uses a log-based, byte-level file system that was developed for transaction-oriented, high performance systems. Scalable and robust, its advantage over non-journaled file systems is its quick restart capability: JFS can restore a file system to a consistent state in a matter of seconds or minutes. The jfsutils is under a compilable state on FreeBSD."

Comments

is it gpl'd?

[rplacd]

if so, it'll never end up as part of the base install.

Re:ReiserFS

[rplacd]

jfs is one of the oldest journalling filesystems available. it's stable, has been stress-tested, is backed by ibm, etc.

reiserfs and ext3fs are nowhere near as capable. xfs is pretty good, too -- in fact, it's what i use on my debian box.

a useful thread to read

[rplacd]

see this thread on journaling filesystems & freebsd.

i'd like to see xfs on freebsd too, but the license...

Re:UFS2, XFS, JFS, Vinum, FreeBSD, JunOS, everythi

[glitchvern]

with regard to XFS

I have yet to see a lengthy FSCK or a corruption.

Lord knows I have. I had a power outage at my house and got an error on boot for my /home partition. When I searched google with the non-unique part of the error message, the first link on google was a message on the xfs mailing list by one of the developers saying he corrected an endian bug that was probably causing people to have recovery failures. Ah, here it is. I couldn't find anything on the web/newsgroups about how to fix it. I think I eventually ended up using xfs_repair. It complained about the filesystem not having been unmounted cleanly and telling me to mount and then unmount the filesystem. Of course I couldn't mount the filesystem anymore. I can't remember what exactly it told me to do in the event that the filesystem could not be mounted, but it involved some scary warning about losing the filesystem. I think it was to use xfs_repair -L (zero out the journal log). I considered creating another partion (I don't need as much space as today's drives ship with so I leave space to create new partitions/grow old ones) and using xfsdump to back up the filesystem at that point, but there was nothing terribly important on there so I just went for it. It repaired the file system just fine. I've had it put stuff in lost+found for some of the other file systems on other power outages (yes, we have lots of power outages and I need to buy a UPS though we don't seem to have had one for 43 days at this point), but that's not really a big deal. It does mostly restore things to how they are suppose to be.
The problem with xfs is that they don't release "stable" patches for 2.4 that often. Oh, they release snapshots for every kernel, but those are at the start of the branch to that kernel and not at the end of the branch. Other than that you can pull their linux kernel with xfs out of their cvs, but they do not have any sort of stable branch in their cvs that I can find. There were 9 months between the release of xfs linux release 1.1 and 1.2 during which time many important bug fixes went into cvs.
Don't get me wrong. I still use xfs as my filesystem. Mostly because they have actual real acl's. I just wish they would release some sort of "stable", "blessed" version of their patches every now and then. Can't wait for 2.6 when it's just included in the stable kernel.

JFS on Linux

[Nickus]

I recently tested JFS on a 2TB raid. In two days I got corruption in the filesystem and I was forced to switch back to ext3. This was with the JFS shipped with RH8.
This doesn't mean anything except I won't touch JFS in a long time. When you need machines in production use you really want to be sure about the filesystems. Too bad the customer wouldn't go with FreeBSD.

Re:{IBM,GNU}/Linux

[WindBourne]

IBM haven't donated *that* much to Linux (not compared to GNU foundation) I am trying to figure out why so many ppl insist that GNU has delivered everything and that companies do not. Who do you think supports GNU and other oss projects? Some of the support is in direct cash. Other times, it is in supporting roles such as tools, bandwidth, etc. They do so by allowing coders to work on company time on these projects. They paid for training for employees that did not directly benefit the company, but it did the employee, esp. with regard to oss. There are many ppl from IBM, HP, Sun, SGI, etc. who have helped on a large number of projects and the company backed them. And yes, I do know each of these companies have had managers who have tried to stop their employees from doing this work, but overall, most have not. Finally, there have been a number of IBMrs who have contributed to Linux in either direct or indirect positions.

Re:ReiserFS

[Arandir]

Infrastructure, as in kernel, filesystem, libc, etc., need to be free. Not free as in it pleases RMS, but free as in no restrictions.

Using this kind of software in an embedded system could mean that unrelated and underived proprietary information might have to be released, since all linkage will be static. If Linux were under the pure GPL without any linkage exception, it would be failing in the embedded market.

General purpose libraries, and stuff that acts as general purpose libraries (kernels, filesystems) must not place any restrictions on software that merely uses them. But the GPL restricts how you may use the software since it (or rather the FSF's interpretation of the GPL) declares that linkage is usage.