The Linux Filesystem Challenge

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?"

Comments

New FS

[stecoop]

Linux must find a next-generation filesystem to keep pace

What are the winds of change saying? R..E..I..S..E..R...4...

Re:New FS

[prisoner-of-enigma]

I've been shouted down before about this, but I'm going to keep asking for it because it's a useful feature for my company: what about per-file compression in the file system? Now before anyone has a hissy fit, let me explain.

We output a lot of digitally-created video files that are huge (think HDTV resolution). Most of these files are output uncompressed because either (a) the file format doesn't support compression or (b) the multimedia program doesn't support compression. Either way, a few minutes of HDTV-quality uncompressed video will absolutely destroy a few hundred gigabytes of space in no time.

We have to hold on to some of this video for quite some time, but we only need to get at it infrequently. It's too big to fit on DVD-R's, tape is too slow, ZIPping it up hinders easy access later, and removable hard drives are expensive. File system compression, on the other hand, does wonders. We routinely get 60%-80% compression on archived video files, and it's allowed us to stretch our disk capacity a long, long way because of it.

We've considered archiving our video in some kind of compressed streaming format like AVI, Quicktime, or MPEG-2, but none of these offer lossless codecs that are appropriate for us, and we're unwilling to accept using a lossy compressor.

So, I ask the question again: when, if ever, is anyone going to implement file compression on a Linux file system? Or does it already exist but is buried somewhere in some arcane HOWTO or website?

I want a transparent filesystem/VM

[valen]

I want a disk equivalent of top - something that'll tell me what processes are kicking the shit out of the disks, and by how much.

If Linux could do that - it's more a VM thing than a filesystem - I'd stick with ext3 for years to come.

Who needs a filesystem in a database when you have a database that lives on your filesystem (updatedb). Get that updating in realtime, with more things (like permissions, access times etc.) and a lot of the work is done.

john

Gnome Storage

[leandrod]

Gnome Storage should be a step in the right direction, and it gets it right by not reinventing the wheel, just using PostgreSQL as its database engine.

This way we can test the waters without messing with the kernel. When the concept is tried, we can decide if we make PostgreSQL a required part of a GNU/Linux system, or a Hurd translator, or whatever.

Re:Hans Reiser's vision of the future

[minginqunt]

In addition to Reiser4, there are a whole whost of projects that aim to provide all or part of what BFS achieved, Spotlight (MacOS X Tiger) and WinFS will achieve.

This includes Beagler/Dashboard

http://www.nat.org/dashboard
http://www.gnome.o rg/projects/beagle/

And of course, the ambitious Gnome Storage project, being pushed by Seth Nickell. He recently wrote a paper comparing all the technologies, found here:

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/document-indexin g

Keep it all modular, please

[JBMcB]

Make the core filesystem small, robust and fast. Journalling, realtime and not much else. Make add-on modules for fancy things like ACL's, quota, compression, encryption, compatability, extended attributes, etc... Put in shims for calling attributes from a database (db or SQL or whatever)

XFS comes close, ReiserFS 4 is nice, too. The most important thing is keeping the base filesystem simple and FAST. You think NTFS is fast? Try deleting a complete Cygwin install (>30K files) It takes AGES, even from the command prompt. I've deleted 15K files (That's 15 THOUSAND files) on Reiser 3 on the same machine, it took a few seconds.

DO NOT make a database driven filesystem. Some day we will have a true, document based desktop paradigm (OpenDoc anyone?) but probably not for several years, until then we need SPEED.

Next generation?

[stratjakt]

Lets get the "this generation" filesystems working correctly, shall we?

Solid, universal support for ACLs, and while we're at it, let's fix the whole user/group namespace mess Unix has with it. Let's use an SID-style id like Windows does.

For example: my small network at home, centrally authenticated through ldap.

Now, windows knows the difference between the user "jim" on local machine A, "jim" on machine B, and "jim" the domain user. They'd be shown as MACHINEA/jim, DOMAIN/jim, etc.. The various SIDs take the domain (or workstation) SID and append the UID. So if his number is 100, his sid is "long-domain-sid" + uid. So when you pass around sid tokens, you know exactly which jim you're talking about.

Now in linux, we just have numbers for users and groups. If user 100 on machine A is "jim", user 100 could be "sally" on machine B. Moving that stuff to ldap becomes messy, now I have to reconcile the numbering schemes of all the machines I want to migrate. Ick. And you get all kinds of screwy stuff sharing folders, if you ls it on one machine it'll show wholly different ownerships.. Is the source of about a billlion and one nfs security holes.

And of course, since a file can only have one permission set - owner, user, group, it sure does make for some sucky shit. The lazy among us would just run as root all the time to avoid the whole damn mess.

I know there's a circle jerk of workarounds, patches and gotchas to avoid this, but it should never be a problem in the first place. The basic unix security model is out-of-date, and is the source of many systemic problems.

Re:Next generation?

[mattdm]

Is the source of about a billlion and one nfs security holes.

Or rather, it is the source of the NFS security hole. But it's okay. NFS4 (or 3, even) with Kerberos totally solves this problem, much more elegantly.

Everyone's all excited by ACLs, but I'm sceptical of their real world value. The "keep it simple" principle of security can't be emphasized enough. With ACLs, you have to really examine the access rights of a given object to figure out what's going on. With the standard Unix user/group system -- with simple directory-based inheritence -- it's completely transparent.

And, most importantly, I've yet to see one thing worth doing with ACLs which couldn't be set up with user/group permissions instead -- and more simply.

Re:Next generation?

[Malor]

Properly done, an ACL system will give you a MORE secure system, not a less secure one, because there are fewer chances for mistakes.

In the NT 4.0 days, one of the better ways to handle permissions was the 'AGLP' standard. User A)ccounts go in G)lobal groups, G)lobal groups go in L)ocal groups, and local groups get P)ermissions.

This allows a nice level of indirection. I implemented this standard by specifying that Global groups described groups of people, and that Local groups specified access privileges. I built Local groups on each server describing the kind of access privileges they offered. Generally, I would make four groups for each of my intended shares: Share NA (no access), Share RO, Share RW, and Share Admin. I would assign the appropriate ACLs in the filesystem, and then put Global groups from the domain into the proper Local groups. The Accounting group, for instance, might get RW on the Accounting share. Management might get RO, and the head of Accounting and the network admins would go into the Share Admin group.

What this meant was that, once I set up a server, I *never again* had to touch filesystem permissions. Not ever. All I had to do was manipulate group membership with User Manager... with the caveat, of course, that affected users had to log off and on again for permissions to take effect. But this is also true with Unix, in many cases. (when group membership changes).

Note that Windows 2K and XP have more advanced ways to handle this, so don't use this design in a Win2K+ network.... this is the beginnings of the right idea, but 2K added some new group concepts. Under Active Directory, this idea isn't quite right. (I'd be more specific but I have forgotten the details... I don't work much with Windows anymore.)

ACLs are key to this setup, because I can arbitrarily specify permissions and assign those permissions to arbitrary groups.

By comparison, User, Group, and Other are exceedingly coarse permissions, and it is very easy to make a mistake. What if someone from Human Resources needs access to a specific Accounting share, but nothing else? Under Unix, I can't just put them in the Accounting group, because that will give them access to everything under that Group permission. I'd probably have to make a new group, and put everyone from Accounting and the one person from HR into that, and then put the special shared files into a specific directory, and make sure the directory is set group suid. That is a lot of steps. Everything is always done in a hurry in IT, and lots of steps are a great way to make mistakes. Messing up just one can result in security compromise.

In my group-based ACL system, I'd still have to make a custom group, perhaps "HR People With Access to Accounting Share". But I'd only have to touch one user account, the HR person's, and wouldn't have to disrupt Accounting's normal workflow at all, or touch any filesystem permissions.

Instead of a whole series of steps, any one of which can be done wrong, I have only three: Create new Global group, put HR person in new Global group, put Global group in the correct Local group. All done. Hard to screw this up too badly.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that a badly-implemented ACL setup is a complete nightmare. But a clean, well-thought-out ACL system, in a complex environment, is virtually always superior to standard Unix permissions.