UFS2 Now Default Creation Type in FreeBSD

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Robert Watson says that effective today, newfs(8) and sysinstall(8) will create UFS2 file systems by default, unless explicitly specified. Users wanting to create UFS1 file systems for whatever reason (interoperability with earlier versions, etc) should be sure to employ the -O1 flag to newfs(8), or hit '1' in the label editor in sysinstall(8) to select UFS1."

Comments

Is it just me ...

[torpor]

... or does a 256-byte inode seem just a bit ... well ... excessive?

Re:Is it just me ...

[mnmn]

Its excessive for now, but thinking about the future. With AMD coming out with a 64bit cpu, and maybe Intel might counter with a 128 bit (!) cpu for the servers, the address space grows. With that, and LVMed 200GB harddisks, and gigs and gigs of ram, we need scalability till FreeBSD 6.0.

Re:Is it just me ...

[pmz]

...maybe Intel might counter with a 128 bit (!) cpu for the servers...

128-bit CPUs probably won't appear for decades. Even today, I have a 64-bit workstation (going on five years old, now), and no program I actively use other than the kernel itself is 64-bit. They're all still 32-bit, because 4GB of RAM is more than enough for my work.

Additionally, it'll be a while before even the biggest servers can exhaust the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes of RAM theoretically available to 64-bit CPUs. If that isn't enough, one day, I'm sure Intel will churn out some sort of hack to make it 147,573,952,589,676,412,928 bytes. Sheesh, 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes ought to be enough for everybody!

Re:Is it just me ...

[Fweeky]

18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes ought to be enough for everybody!

A Culture Mind has somewhere in the region of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (about 1,000,000YB) of memory. 128 bits are enough to reference the memory of about 340 million such Minds; 64bits would run out before you'd got past the first 0.00000000001% of the first Mind. No prizes for guessing which filesystem such godlike AI's will be using ;)

Re:Is it just me ...

[mnmn]

You sound so like Gates when he said 1MB ram should be enough for everyone.

Apart from the addressing space, theres also the wider IO, and replacing say MMX which is a hack to widen the bus. I know I cant think of much on how to use a 128bit CPU right now, but moores law has been evasive.

Gentoo Zealot Translator

[Anonymous Coward]

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

NetBSD rules! Anyway, Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

-

A quick point

[bofkentucky]

This is for FreeBSD 5.x, FreeBSD 4.x is still using UFS1

Re:A quick point

[mnmn]

So the FreeBSD 5.0 RELEASE I downloaded yesterday should do the UFS2 install by default?? or "from today" mean all versions of FreeBSD 5.0 from 21st April?

Re:A quick point

[bofkentucky]

Any release after 4/21 or if you are tracking -5.0-current with cvsup, it will probably upgrade the tools.

Re:A quick point

[elbuddha]

From today means for HEAD (aka "-current") from April 20th onward.

RELENG_5_0 is only for security fixes, and will not include this change.

Eventually, when RELENG_5_1_0_RELEASE is tagged, it will include this change.

UFS is dying

[nathanh]

It is official; Robert Watson now confirms: UFS is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered UFS community when Robert Watson confirmed that UFS market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all filesystems. Coming on the heels of a recent FreeBSD survey which plainly states that UFS has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. UFS is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent comprehensive filesystem test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict UFS's future. The hand writing is on the wall: UFS faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for UFS because UFS is dying. Things are looking very bad for UFS. As many of us are already aware, UFS continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

All major surveys show that UFS has steadily declined in market share. UFS is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If UFS is to survive at all it will be among OpenBSD dabblers. UFS continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, UFS is dead.

Fact: UFS is dying

I feel dirty...

Re:UFS is dying

[pmz]

For all practical purposes, UFS is dead.

Wait, my Sun workstation uses UFS...NO CARRIER.

<the haunting sound of one-handed clapping ensues from the Slashdot crowd and pmz's ego sinks into oblivion>

Re:UFS is dying

[RLiegh]

You know, UFS may not be dying, but any compatability with Linux (mount -o ufstype=wtfthisweek?!?!?) is out the window.

Correct me if I'm wrong [I'm on dialup, no iso for me. :~(].

Re:UFS is dying

[evilviper]

Actually, UFS is nearly a universal filesystem!!! UFS is obviously available on all the BSDs, which includes Darwin, and Mac OS X. It's also available on Linux, Solaris, and I presume every other Unix OS. The one place UFS doesn't work, is on Windows, which is as unfortunate limitation. I'm not versed in Windows programming, so I can only hope to find out that someone wrote a UFS filesystem driver for Windows.

There is only one other filesystem that is more universal, and that is the ilustrious FAT32. There are numerous drawbacks to FAT32 however. Since it had to be reverse engineered, many systems do not support many of it's features. For instance, OpenBSD doesn't support long filenames on FAT partitions. In addition, FAT partitions experience severe fragmentation under all implimentations (and really nothing but windows supports defragmentation). They also do not support permissions, so you are completely out of luck in that department.

You cannot create a FAT32 partition that is larger than about 32 GB. In this world of 200GB+ hard drives, that's a ridiculous limitation. Performance sucks as well. Even on Windows, the performance of FAT32 isn't flattering. On other platforms, the performance can be even worse. I have yet to come across a platform where FAT performance is better than UFS performance. With softupdates on the BSDs, UFS performance rivals and surpasses the very best of filesystems available. Even in theory, journaling cannot hope to beat the performance of soft updates, although it's possible that journaling could be implimented on UFS in a backwards compatible way (similar to EXT3), for those that want the feature.

So, I sincerely hope UFS isn't dying, in fact, I'm still waiting for it to gain the popularity it deserves, and have it become the default filesystem on all sorts of devices, instead of FAT32.

And anyone that knows of any effort to give Windows UFS filesystem support, I'd like to hear about it.

UFS vs FFS

[Stonent1]

I thought that the Freely available BSDs used Berkley FFS by default?

Polaris# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/sd0a / ffs rw 1 1

Polaris# mount
/dev/sd0a on / type ffs (local)

One in the same or different? Or there are slight variations between the BSDs default FS? How does UFS2 compare to FFS with soft-updates?

Re:UFS vs FFS

[DarkHelmet433]

UFS == FFS. Its a slightly different name/acronym for the same thing. NetBSD/OpenBSD completed a tree-wide sweep and changed all UFS references to FFS for consistency. FreeBSD still (mostly) calls it UFS. "Fast File System" is not much better than "Unix File System". "Berkeley Fast File System" (BFFS) would be most correct.

How do they compare? They all pretty much use the same on-disk format. There were some relatively recent changes (dirpref) that started using some previously unused space. I think this has been ported to Net/OpenBSD now. You already mentioned soft-updates, but this doesn't change the fs format except add a new flag bit. And then there are snapshots (which depend on soft-updates) and again, they just use some extra flag and file type bits. UFS2 is a significant on-disk format change. All the 32-bit block addresses and sizes are now 64 bits so the 1TB/2TB file system and file size limits are gone. It is the 64 bit stuff that is the primary reason for the larger inode sizes.

Which filesystem?

[torpor]

I dunno ... but will Al Gore have invented it?