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The Linux Filesystem Challenge

Posted by timothy on from the joneses-went-thattaway dept.

Joe Barr writes "Mark Stone has thrown down the gauntlet for Linux filesystem developers in his thoughtful essay on Linux.com. The basic premise is that Linux must find a next-generation filesystem to keep pace with Microsoft and Apple, both of whom are promising new filesystems in a year or two. Never mind that Microsoft has been promising its "innovative" native database/filesystem (copying an idea from IBM's hugely successful OS/400) for more than ten years now. Anybody remember Cairo?"

7 of 654 comments (clear)

  1. Hans Reiser's vision of the future by alanw · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hans Reiser has written a white paper containing his thoughts on the design of the next major version of ReiserFS.

    1. Re:Hans Reiser's vision of the future by MouseR · · Score: 5, Informative

      Apple's Spotlight isn't a file system. It's a search engine that uses and maintains metadata stored in the file system.

      HFS+ is the current OS X file system, and that of Tiger (next revision of OS X) as well. Spotlight uses HFS+'s built-in metadata support to enhance it's search capabilities. What Tiger offers more to application developers is an API to add metadata to documents, something that was limited until now.

  2. Re:New FS by AstroDrabb · · Score: 5, Informative
    Reiser4 is going to be great. Here are some of the features for those who don't like to click-n-read:

    1. * Reiser4 is the fastest filesystem,
    2. and here are the benchmarks.
    1. * Reiser4 is an atomic filesystem, which means that your filesystem operations either entirely occur, or they entirely don't, and they don't corrupt due to half occuring. We do this without significant performance losses, because we invented algorithms to do it without copying the data twice.
    1. * Reiser4 uses dancing trees, which obsolete the balanced tree algorithms used in databases (see farther down). This makes Reiser4 more space efficient than other filesystems because we squish small files together rather than wasting space due to block alignment like they do. It also means that Reiser4 scales better than any other filesystem. Do you want a million files in a directory, and want to create them fast? No problem.
    1. * Reiser4 is based on plugins, which means that it will attract many outside contributors, and you'll be able to upgrade to their innovations without reformatting your disk. If you like to code, you'll really like plugins....
    1. * Reiser4 is architected for military grade security (sponsored by DARPA). You'll find it is easy to audit the code, and that assertions guard the entrance to every function.

    Notice the plugin feature. This will create endless possibilities for what you can do with the file system. Want to tie a DB/SQL search function in to it? Write a plugin, want special security? Write a plugin. Tons of possibilites with ReiserFS4 and it is _very_ fast. This is hands down better then the MS "a filesystem as a DB" approach. ReiserFS4 will be like Firebird, lean-n-mean-n-fast. Want more features, grab _your_ favorite plugins!
    --
    If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
    it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
  3. Re:Next premise, please by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Informative

    And neither of whom have a journaled filesystem yet, while Linux has many to choose from.

    What are you talking about? NTFS has had journalling for over a decade. And Unicode. And ACLs. And streams. And reparse points (these are amazingly cool). And compression. And encryption. And ... you get the point.

    Now, MS doesn't use most of this good stuff, but it's all in there. Even three-letter file extensions on Windows are obsolete, since everything on NTFS can be an OLE server. There's nothing on Linux that comes close to the capabilities of NTFS. About the only major thing NTFS is missing is versionning, which VMS has.

  4. Re:not so fast ... by poelzi · · Score: 5, Informative
    P.S. The whole thing - filesystem as a DB - is complete crap. You can't do a bunch of fs operations in a single transaction and have ACID semantics on the transaction as a whole. Sure - searching is great. But database means much more than just a searching interface.


    Sorry, but you are wrong here. Reiser4 is atomic and you can pack as many operations into one transaction as you like, you just have to use the reiser4 system call. This is, because there is no standard system call for atomic filesystem transactions. Modern filesystems are databases, build to store files and query them trough filenames, reiser4 is the first filesystem where search path can be done through plugins, therefore you can index everything you want.
    --
    kindly regards daniel
  5. Re:New FS by FleaPlus · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're concerned about compression speed, you may want to take a look at LZO. It's got incredibly fast compression, and even faster decompression. I think it was even used on the Mars Rovers.

  6. Re:New FS (Reiser4 has a compression plugin coming by hansreiser · · Score: 5, Informative

    Reiser4 has a compression plugin coming. We got gzip to work, but it consumes too much cpu, so now we are doing lzo which can compress at disk drive speed. The lzo plugin has a bug, maybe next week....

    Hans

    (You can email edward@namesys.com for details).