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Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) Now GPL

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the yet-another-convert dept.

melios writes "In a move that could help boost the scalability of Linux for grids and other advanced 64-bit multiprocessor applications, HP has released its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) source code to the open source community. Source code, design documentation, and test suites for AdvFS are available on SourceForge."

77 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Sheesh... by adolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Allow me to be the first to say: It's about fucking time.

    --
    Kid-proof tablet..
    1. Re:Sheesh... by snoyberg · · Score: 3, Funny

      M$ and $UN are more dead then B$D!!! lol

      Yes, but does netcraft confirm it?

      --
      Thank God for evolution.
    2. Re:Sheesh... by Winter+Lightning · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In your face ZFS losers!!! The penguin is unstoppable. We have the best coders who can do stuff like this. M$ and $UN are more dead then B$D!!! lol So why didn't the penguin coders do it? AdvFS was developed by Digital as piece of closed source; aren't you rewriting history to suggest that it came from the Linux community?

      Declarations/health warnings:
        1) I work for Sun and I rather like ZFS :-)
        2) In a former life I also used AdvFS and thought
                  it was a good filesystem; probably the best general
                  purpose FS around until ZFS.
        3) Integrating AdvFS into Linux and exercising it for prime
                  time won't be an overnight job; perhaps several years
                  before it can be deemed trustworthy.

  2. Re:A new open file system? by PalmKiller · · Score: 4, Funny

    Who?

  3. What's the point? by tjstork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is there some reason to pick this file system over any of the other 100 file systems you can get for Linux?

    --
    This is my sig.
    1. Re:What's the point? by cephah · · Score: 5, Funny

      This one is -- advanced, so it must be good, right? Right?

    2. Re:What's the point? by eclectro · · Score: 5, Funny

      because it's not a "killer" filesystem?

      --
      Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
    3. Re:What's the point? by bsDaemon · · Score: 4, Funny

      i dunno... no wifi, less space than ZFS. lame!

    4. Re:What's the point? by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Informative

      AdvFS is comparable in features to ZFS - it has snapshotting, intelligent striping and mirroring, dynamic resizing, etc.

      In short, there's no comparable production filesystem in Linux right now. There's Btrfs from Oracle, but it's in deep alpha.

    5. Re:What's the point? by Vectronic · · Score: 5, Informative

      Comparison Of File Systems

      Although its missing from some of the charts...

      AdvFS

      And that page is rather limited in information.

    6. Re:What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Nah dude, SGI's xfs (in vanilla Linux since ages now) can do all of those tricks, too.

    7. Re:What's the point? by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, it can't. XFS has not the concept of "storage pool" that ZFS and AdvFS have. It doesn't have ZFS/AdvFS-style snapshots. XFS is also a journaling filesystem, unlike ZFS (AdvFS however is a journaled filesystem - and even then, the journaling modes of advfs allow to configure a much better data integrity than ZFS)

    8. Re:What's the point? by Paul+Jakma · · Score: 4, Informative

      It doesn't have the Merkle tree and the associated error-detection properties of ZFS though.

      Also, AdvFS (or PolyFS, as I could swear it was called in the beginning - though Google can't seem to any record of it) had a pretty bad reliability record in its earlier days, at least bad enough that its unreliability still was mentioned in DEC Open Systems Support when I visited there in 2000.. (by which stage Tru64 clearly was on life-support). ;)

      --
      I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
    9. Re:What's the point? by raddan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you don't need to know the difference, then no. But there are plenty of people who have specific requirements, and I'm glad that Linux supports them. E.g., we pay to have our Linux machines use CVFS (StorNext) and associated daemons, because we require its features. A GPL'ed CVFS suite would be awesome, but I can understand why Quantum wouldn't want to do it.

    10. Re:What's the point? by mhall119 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Hopefully this will make Sun re-consider licensing ZFS under the GPLv2.

      --
      http://www.mhall119.com
    11. Re:What's the point? by joib · · Score: 4, Funny

      So is ZFS, genius...

    12. Re:What's the point? by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Informative

      No. XFS is a multimedia-oriented filesystem, it was designed to support multithreaded streaming with guaranteed access times. It works well for these use-cases.

      But it doesn't work well for a lot of other use-cases, though. Hence, the current development of Btrfs.

    13. Re:What's the point? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      Hopefully this will make Sun re-consider licensing ZFS under the GPLv2.

      Doubtful. GPLv3 is too nice a license for them to reject just because Linus is being bullheaded.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    14. Re:What's the point? by Znork · · Score: 5, Interesting

      it has snapshotting, intelligent striping and mirroring, dynamic resizing

      Eh, exactly which feature is unique? Snapshotting, striping, mirroring, resizing, encryption, etc, all of it can be done through the device mapper stack.

      I have situations where I don't want any filesystem at all on the mixed chunks (shared iSCSI block devices, for example), others where I want partial mirrors, parts crypted, parts remote-synced, etc. Mixing block device, volume management and filesystem together in my opinion, simply bad engineering. There are far too many assumptions about what people usually do so you end up with something suitable only for exactly what the designer had in mind, and worse, sometimes completely unsuitable for what people actually do.

      Having run both AdvFS and ZFS, I _vastly_ prefer the layered approach of ext3/LVM/md/etc.

      there's no comparable production filesystem

      Yes, well, try actually running ZFS in production for a while with any kind of odd load (and some not so odd loads at all). Sometimes things just aren't all they're hyped up to be.

      Filesystems are one part of most systems where 'exciting' isn't the most desirable feature.

    15. Re:What's the point? by Nutria · · Score: 4, Informative

      Is there some reason to pick this file system over any of the other 100 file systems you can get for Linux?

      AdvFS is a clustered FS.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    16. Re:What's the point? by Anarke_Incarnate · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ZFS is an excellent filesystem but with some serious bugs that are poorly documented. I will admit I have not played with it in a while, but when I did, there were a considerable number of growing pains and kernel tunables that needed to be tweaked to get it to play nicely. The read block size is 128K by default, the ARC buffer size is ridiculously designed to assume that you want to cache data, filesystem syncs run to check integrity even if you have disk integrity checks on the SAN, etc.

    17. Re:What's the point? by master5o1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I have a Merkle tree growing in my backyard.

      --
      signature is pants
    18. Re:What's the point? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think snapshots, mirrors, stripes, encryption, compression and resizing are all very useful things. Got it.

      But I'd like my file system to stick to managing files and use the volume and block layers to provide those features under any file system. How, exactly, should the block layer provide resizing or compression?

      I mean, yes, you can do snapshots -- clumsily, as you have to set aside space for it (can't just stuff it into free space on that volume) -- and that's inherent in the nature of the device-mapper. There's no way for DM to know which blocks are free -- that's the filesystem's job.

      And yes, you should be able to do compression at the block level -- or at least, read-only compression, as we see on livecds these days. How would you add write support? If you tell the filesystem it's on a 10 gig device, and it's really on a 5 gig device, what happens when I write 6 gigs of high-entropy data to it? If you tell the filesystem it's on a 5 gig device, I won't be able to write 6 gigs of low-entropy data (text), because how would the block layer tell the filesystem it has more space?

      Now, I get it that ZFS is too monolithic. I do. But the current volume/block layers are not sufficient to get some of the more interesting features of ZFS, without creating a filesystem that's as monolithic as ZFS. (There's no technical reason you couldn't port ZFS to Linux.)

      At the very least, we need more layers. Maybe an extent layer, to start with. I'm actually going to start developing exactly that -- prototyping in Ruby (with FUSE). It'll be fast enough for my purposes, and if people really want speed, they can port it to the kernel -- I just don't feel like writing C.

      I'm thinking an API something like this:

      id = extents.store(some_string)
      Obviously, allow for streaming, multiple devices, etc, but you get the idea. You could layer them, too -- compression would be a layer you can slip between any backend device (block layer, network store, RAM, whatever) and any filesystem, in pretty much the same way you can slip encryption between any block device and any filesystem today.
      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
    19. Re:What's the point? by Macka · · Score: 4, Informative

      It doesn't have the Merkle tree and the associated error-detection properties of ZFS though.

      Also, AdvFS (or PolyFS, as I could swear it was called in the beginning - though Google can't seem to any record of it) had a pretty bad reliability record in its earlier days, at least bad enough that its unreliability still was mentioned in DEC Open Systems Support when I visited there in 2000.. (by which stage Tru64 clearly was on life-support). ;)

      It was pretty flakey around Tru64 v4, but got a major re-write for Tru64 v5 which cleared up the problems and made it very stable after that. Today, it's the most stable filesystem I've ever used. And you're right about the Poly stuff. There was a marketing drive which fortunately didn't last very long where they tried to brand it as the Polyserve filesystem, then it got changed. Even Polyserve was an improvement on its birth name, the MegaSafe Filesystem. You can still see remnants of that in the Tru64 kernel config file: its the options MSFS line that triggers inclusion of AdvFS into the kernel. The word MegaSafe also crops up all over the source tree too. Go take a look ;-)
    20. Re:What's the point? by The+name+is+Dave.+Ja · · Score: 3, Funny

      Thear, thear. Don't get all in a knot over spelling.

    21. Re:What's the point? by tietokone-olmi · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, I guess that's what one gets for distrusting the FSF.

      Linus is apparently vulnerable to close friends whispering things in his ear. Take Larry McVoy for instance: far as I know, mr. Torvalds supported BitKeeper until McVoy terminated the free license; that is to say, Linus was perfectly fine with all the competition-restricting license details and the use of proprietary software to manage a Free Software project. And if you remember, back in 0.x and 1.x days, things like sound card drivers for Linux used to be proprietary, for-pay software!

      I wouldn't be surprised if his original rejection of the "or later" licensing model had come from some other "friend" of his. Influence is a curious thing after all, especially in the case of a person whose principles and strength of character are lacking.

    22. Re:What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      "He can't change the kernel to be GPLv3 compatible after the fact."

      Yes he can. He even said how (while I can't find the reference on Google, lame me). Basically, he would do a public announcement: Hey, folks, I'll go GPLv3 in six months; whoever that have something to say, do so or be silent for ever. By the way, that's how he went from GPLv1 to GPLv2 quite some years ago.

    23. Re:What's the point? by Fweeky · · Score: 2

      Erm, ZFS is layered; you can put UFS or ext2 or.. whatever, on top of a zpool, complete with RAID, checksumming, copy on write, etc (features which all fit well together in that layer). I don't really see how it's any different from LVM, except zvol's happen to be able to do a bit more between the devices they consume and the devices they provide.

    24. Re:What's the point? by pdp1144 · · Score: 2, Funny

      It can generate the message, "Converting space into time" When it is reorganizing the file system structure to optimize how much data you and put on the file system; over how quickly you can access the data. We still talk about this message at work; and we haven't seen it in over ten years. We had the data center evacuated for safety when we first saw it.

    25. Re:What's the point? by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, I guess that's what one gets for distrusting the FSF. Not to troll, but why trust the FSF with the ability to relicense your code as you see fit? The relative value of the GPLv3 is, in this case, irrelevant to Linus's line of thinking.
       
      And seriously--BitKeeper worked for Linus's needs. He's a pragmatist, not an idealist.
      --
      "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
    26. Re:What's the point? by IgnoramusMaximus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The poster you are replying to:

      ... a person whose principles and strength of character are lacking.

      You:

      He's a pragmatist, not an idealist.

      It apparently escaped you that these are pretty much one and the same thing.

      An idealist, for example, is a politician who would try to stick to his beliefs even when sniper's bullets are whizzing next to his head. A "pragmatist" is a politician who will take all the lobbyist money he can get his paws on (after all this is the "reality" of politics, surely?), promise everyone "centrist compromises". "bridging the gap", "reaching across the isles" etc to get elected and then do everything that his most powerful and rich friends ever wanted.

      In short "pragmatist" is the Polite Society's code word for "spineless, unprincipled opportunist".

  4. Cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The last file system I messed around with was absolute murder.

    1. Re:Cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hans? Is that you?

  5. AdvFS by MrMunkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    I didn't know any of the details of what AdvFS was, so here is what Wikipedia has: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdvFS

    1. Re:AdvFS by BrentH · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Thanks. Still I have one question: does it do background filechecks (against a built-in checksum) like ZFS does?

    2. Re:AdvFS by BrentH · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The thing I like of ZFS is that it moves basically all file-related stuff to the actual filesystem, which makes sense to me, since that's why I have a filesystem. You basically don't need to know all these annoying details, or make checksum-databases yourself and check regularly. Still, the question stands.

  6. I think I will wait... by TimothyDavis · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...I hear WinFS will be in Win7...it should be legendary.

  7. Spiritual ancestor of ZFS by mihalis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I just had a quick glance through the wikipedia page on this filesystem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdvFS
    and it seems to share a surprising number of features with ZFS
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
    For example, pools, snapshots etc.

    Cool, license squabbling aside I look forward to the massively fragmented UNIX codebase slowly coalescing in this area.

  8. As a former Digital UNIX admin... by Minwee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...all I can say is that this would have been amazing news about ten years ago. Even five years ago it would have been pretty great.

    Now? Well, it sounds like HPaq is just kicking it to the curb so it will probably be another year or two before anyone can beat it into a working filesystem for anything but HPucks. There is already no shortage of file systems that can do what AdvFS could do, so by the time it is ready for prime time prime time will have moved on.

    Oh well. 1998 me is still pleased to hear this.

    1. Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... by rahvin112 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Linux Weekly News has a comment from an HP developer indicating they aren't putting this out there so it can become a linux file system, but so that the lessons learned and parts of the code that are useful can be incorporated into one of the linux file systems of the future. I took it to mean, take our code and use whatever you can to make ext4 or ext5.
       
       

      While it would be fine with HP if someone wants to "port" AdvFS to Linux or any other
      operating system with a GPLv2 compatible license, this contribution is not intended to
      "compete" with other existing file system projects underway in and around the kernel.org
      development community.

      Rather, our hope is that the algorithms, design documentation, and test suite now available at
      the AdvFS site... and the active participation of HP engineers in various open-source file
      system projects who have lots of AdvFS experience... will help to accelerate the inclusion of
      AdvFS-like enterprise features and capabilities in next-generation file systems for Linux.

    2. Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... by fm6 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh well. 1998 me is still pleased to hear this. Is 1998 you still on the line? Warn him that Star Trek: Insurrection really sucks!
    3. Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... by youngdev · · Score: 2, Funny

      you have a chance to impart some great information to someone of the past and you want to be a film critic? How lame.

    4. Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's all you'd tell your 1998 self?!?? I'd tell mine to invest heavily in the DotComs so he'd lose all his money...it'd be hilarious like that time someone told me they were my future self and that I should invest heavily in DotCom start-ups and I lost all my money!

    5. Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... by Curlsman · · Score: 5, Informative

      This was the filesystem that HP tried to port to HPUX and failed. They licensed Veritas instead.
      I figured that the multithreading that I'd always heard worked so well in AdvFS/Tru64 was hard to port to the non-multithreaded HPUX kernel.

      http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39175690,00.htm
      "It had initially planned to complete the migration of the TruCluster/AdvFS feature from Tru64 Unix to HP-UX 11i v3 in the middle of 2006."

      http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1214253121145+28353475&threadId=754760
      "No TruCluster or AdvFS for HP-UX after all"

    6. Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... by dbrower · · Score: 3, Informative

      This was the filesystem that HP tried to port to HPUX and failed. They licensed Veritas instead.

      http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39175690,00.htm "It had initially planned to complete the migration of the TruCluster/AdvFS feature from Tru64 Unix to HP-UX 11i v3 in the middle of 2006."

      http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1214253121145+28353475&threadId=754760 "No TruCluster or AdvFS for HP-UX after all"

      It probably would have made the release too, except that it got canned after it was working.

      It wasn't that HP failed to port ADVfs and trucluster to HPUX -- it was that they decided to stop it in favor of the other solution for arguably political and financial reasons. The people at HP in California were more than happy for the DEC people in New Hampshire to go away, even at the cost of licensing something that was no better than what they already owned outright, but would need to fund support for.

      One wonders why they have bothered with this release at this point.

      -dB

      --
      "It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
    7. Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... by Macka · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Spot on. If you download the sources, there's a README file in the advfs_gen3_src_v1 directory that says:

      This directory includes the source code for a second generation
      implementation of AdvFS, including the kernel modules, commands
      and utilities.

      This is the code that was ported to HP-UX. It is functionally
      complete and went through fairly extensive functional and stress
      testing. However, it should be considered beta quality and so
      you may spot bugs. It is recommended that you review the
      design documentation which is also available at this site
      as it will guide you through the major subsystems.

      This code will not build on HP-UX because it requires a
      specialized build environment. HP-UX users are discouraged
      from attempting to build or use this code on HP-UX as it will
      not be supported by HP.

      So it made the port ok. But it was a very lucrative deal between HP and Veritas over VxFS and their Cluster Silesystem that killed it. Money talks, and Veritas must've been crapping themselves that HP were about to walk away in favour of something better and home grown.

      Though why anyone would want to use Veritas Cluster Filesystem considering the whopping price tag that comes with it, is beyond me.

    8. Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... by Minwee · · Score: 4, Informative

      Which would be why the subject references "Digital UNIX", which was the name used by DEC after they gave up on OSF/1. Tru64 was Compaq's name for it, because they really hated words that were spelled correctly.

      Of course if you know enough to nit-pick that then you would also know about what happened to it after the HP-Compaq merger and how the last surviving Digital engineers tried to weld useful features like AdvFS and TruCluster onto HP-UX only to have their projects canceled in favour of inferior and more expensive Carly-approved products.

      So I won't explain that, given the lineage of the code, it's probably the stuff that was ported to HP-UX.

  9. Re:A new open file system? by Urger · · Score: 2, Funny

    Woosh

    --
    Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
  10. Good News Indeed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I used ADVFS when I worked at DEC/Compaq. It is a really nice filesystem to use.
    If the utilities are GPL's as well that is even better news.

    Copying whole filesystems is a breeze as is copying filesystem trees and traversing over volume mount points ( ie not including mount points and all their files.)

    It also gives you the ability to add/remove extra space to mounted volumes just like LVM does but IMHO without having to pre allocate it.
    I would expect that some of the features may well be in EXT4 but I think that some of the Utilities could be made to use EXT4. /S
     

    1. Re:Good News Indeed by Lennie · · Score: 4, Informative

      To answer your question, yes the utilities are user GPL-license.

      --
      New things are always on the horizon
  11. Re:A new open file system? by fm6 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Your sarcasm detector needs adjustment.

  12. What's the obsession with filesystems? by pschmied · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Certainly the Linux community doesn't really need to burn energy supporting a half dozen filesystems.

    Talk to six linux admins and you'll get at least that many "every filesystem but the one I'm using sucks!" responses.

    I'd gladly stand up for a lack of choice on the filesystem front. Pick one, make sure it's absolutely tested, make sure it supports a nice range of features.

    Integrating a filesystem into another OS is a decidedly non-trivial task unless you just want to read files.

    Thanks, HP, but I don't really want your no-longer-commercially-viable undead zombieware.

    --
    . Penguins Surely Ca
    1. Re:What's the obsession with filesystems? by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But then you end up with the windows situation, where they only support NTFS (or FAT32, but who uses that). I don't think that any 1 file system is optimal for all tasks that one would want to use a computer for. People use computers for many different things. It makes complete sense to have file systems that accommodate the needs of different people.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:What's the obsession with filesystems? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Exactly! They should just create a data structure and search algorithm with O(1) in all use cases.

    3. Re:What's the obsession with filesystems? by buchner.johannes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly! They should just create a data structure and search algorithm with O(1) in all use cases.

      Linux has that, it's called /dev/null
      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    4. Re:What's the obsession with filesystems? by CastrTroy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, for Linux, I would say that you have Ext2, and Ext3, and that I guess Ext4, which will be the NewFS. If you aren't at all concerned with the differences, then just use EXT. I don't think a larger percentage of people run anything else. However, I think that having a system that assumes that there will be other file systems makes it a lot more flexible. Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to get good EXT2/3 support windows. It's specifically because it was written from the point of view, that nobody would ever want to use any file system, other than NTFS or FAT. So it's inherently hard to get any other file system working with it. If you work with the idea that some people may want other file systems, it doesn't end up as so much of a problem. I wouldn't want to run my servers using EXT3, but it sure would be nice to be able to mount my Ext file systems when I dual book into windows. I know it can be done, but all the solutions seem like big kludges, that only half work.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    5. Re:What's the obsession with filesystems? by Ant+P. · · Score: 2, Informative

      Integrating a filesystem into another OS is a decidedly non-trivial task unless you just want to read files. Write a FUSE driver. Problem nonexistent.

      As for "too much choice", you may prefer to solve every problem with a hammer but I prefer a toolbox.

    6. Re:What's the obsession with filesystems? by Shimbo · · Score: 2, Informative

      And that's why SuSE sucks, it still defaults to reiser.

      It hasn't since about 2006 in the OpenSuSE versions. Their timing kind of sucked though, since the change was just after the stable Enterprise versions shipped.
    7. Re:What's the obsession with filesystems? by Fnordulicious · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, Apple isn't exactly moving from Old FS (HFS+) to New FS (UFS, née FFS) any time soon. HFS+ is basically required for the boot volume, and HFS+ has a number of features that don't exist in UFS (ACLs, file creation dates, extents, journaling, file type and creator codes, archive timestamps, etc.). That said, HFS+ certainly sucks for a number of reasons, but UFS is no replacement candidate. ZFS has a future with the Xserve and other server uses, but whether ZFS will ever be used on the Apple desktop remains to be seen; current suspicion is that it probably won't since ZFS isn't bootable on Sun machines yet.

  13. Re:A new open file system? by east+coast · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Around here it's hard to tell who's serious and who's not anymore. It's amazing some of the things that get asked around here seriously. Just look up the Ask Slashdot section and you'll see tons of it.

    --
    Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
  14. Ask Slashdot by spun · · Score: 4, Funny

    I am totally serious: why does the back of my left ear smell like cheese doodles? I don't store any kind of foodstuffs behind my ear, and I bathe regularly. Please help.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    1. Re:Ask Slashdot by fimbulvetr · · Score: 4, Funny

      At least they're not stealing underpants anymore. Must have been because I saved that gnome in halflife 2 episode 2. Ever since then, they seem to be treating me better.

    2. Re:Ask Slashdot by larpon · · Score: 3, Funny

      you've been waiting so long to find a chance to post this haven't you? ;P

  15. Re:A new open file system? by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    When somebody asks a question that could be answered by a very simple Google, they're either being funny or they're so terminally lazy it's silly to respond too them. And when the question is about a guy whose murder trial has been in the news (especially the nerdcentric news) for months, I think it's safe to assume that the questioner is not being lazy.

  16. Interesting by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Everyone has been looking at ZFS to provide a whole lot of this same feature set, but the CDDL license has been a significant stumbling block. Releasing AdvFS as GPL could actually put it in the running for real world adoption and use on a large scale. I think Sun already considered this a battle won and may now have to rethink their strategy. If they released Sun as GPL in the next month, I'd be willing to bet AdvFS would probably be largely ignored and become a historical footnote. If Sun waits and lets it gain traction (as they tend to do) it could be they will find themselves with another cool technology they sat on too long and which has been replaced y the OSS community.

    1. Re:Interesting by Trixter · · Score: 2, Informative

      I remember reading responses by kernel devs saying they would not put ZFS into the kernel, regardless of license. IIRC, it was because it violated in so many spectacular ways the concept of layering.

      Yes, which is how it is able to do the amazing things that it does. Some of the stuff ZFS does -- and only ZFS does -- is because the storage management and filesystem are merged.

      The people who bash ZFS haven't used it, haven't researched it, or both.

  17. Tru64 goodness by JayMcB74 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I really hope everyone will join me in thanking HP for this and encourage them to release more of the Tru64 OS, HP has been on my $&!â list since they bought and buried this years ago. They are sitting on so much good IP that I really wish that they would only make printers and just the 4000+ series at that.

    --
    Lend a hand to the masses Lest It be done incorrectly or woefully worse By those not versed in the ways of the Dogcow
    1. Re:Tru64 goodness by cparker15 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm glad I expanded my threshold before I posted the comment I was originally going to post. HP just donated a whole bunch of their code to the community, and people are so ungrateful that they're actually complaining about it. Huh??!

      Thanks, HP! :)

      --
      Have you driven a fnord... lately?

      You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.

    2. Re:Tru64 goodness by uassholes · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I used to be in DEC SW services. Some of their SW products were good, but the Alpha was outstanding. HP can go to hell and suck donkey ass for destroying it and other DEC products in favor of Fucktanium and their own horseshit.

    3. Re:Tru64 goodness by uassholes · · Score: 2, Informative

      Forgot to mention: 1) VMS is also outstanding. A VMS cluster apparently holds the record for "uptime"; over 10 years: http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=06/01/08/4531954 2) Did I mention Carly Fiorina sucks ass

    4. Re:Tru64 goodness by MichaelSmith · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hey don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

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      http://michaelsmith.id.au
  18. Re:How many filesystems by afidel · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What do you think actually powers many of those SAN/Hardware/NAS/NFS file servers, Linux of course. I really don't think the lack of file systems is holding Linux back, but having more of them that fit into more niches is sure to mean more adoption because Linux will be the hammer that fits the nail for those users.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  19. STOP LAUGHING YOU HEARTLESS BASTARDS! by Tetsujin · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's not funny! It's wrong! It's wrong to laugh at other people's misery! Stop laughing!

    I mean, look at this:
    "The last file system I messed around with was absolute murder."

    That is clearly meant to poke fun at how EXT3 is gradually replacing EXT2. A lot of people worked very hard on EXT2, it's served the Linux community well for a long time, so I don't think it's right to make fun of it like this!!!

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  20. Re:If only... What could have been w/o HP's NIH is by turgid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You're not a PHB are you? Let me explain it, DEC/HP/Compaq is a PHB company. When these decisions were taken, unix was legacy and Windows NT was the Way Forward. To hell with technical or business requirements. With enough spin and shiny marketing, all things are possible. That's why we're all running 32-bit Windows PCs and the entire world's servers are running an NT-derivative on itanic. Unix is dead. RISC is dead. x86 is 32-bit only.

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    Stick Men
  21. Re:A new open file system? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Funny

    Isn't he the antagonist in Hellreiser? The daemonic killer who keeps a journal of its victims.

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    Ezekiel 23:20
  22. I currently use Tru64 in production at least.. by Bonzoli · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I currently use Tru64 in production at least for another month. One of the issues with this encapsulation type FS process is it sucks. If I had to try and figure out how to merge two File systems by some vote of talking heads, this would be the result. It has some strong and good things it does well, but the way Tru64 merged it's file systems together, makes the final product a huge pain to administer and fix. Learn what you can from the code, and make something better. Do not try and port this crap to something else as is, you wont be happy.

    Why do you think HP bought again the newer Veritas File system and didn't use the already payed for version they picked up with Tru64?

    It has some good things in it. Pick them out carefully and learn from them. Then think about what is needed to administer your File systems in real life, and implement it.

  23. Agree with first poster - about time by Master+of+Transhuman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But it doesn't go nearly far enough.

    HP needs to kill HP/UX, IBM needs to kill AIX, and anybody else with a proprietary UNIX needs to kill it, and donate the source code to Linux. Including Sun with Solaris.

    Had they done this ten years ago, Linux would be running the show now, instead of Microsoft.

    The big companies have utterly no need for a proprietary UNIX that does nothing but jack up their development costs. Donate the existing code to Linux, wait until what fits and makes Linux sufficiently enterprise-level is adopted, then adopt Linux as their unified platform. Then they can devote development expenses to differentiating themselves with system management software, which is the sort of software open source tends to lag in producing.

    By sitting on their asses, all they've done is give Microsoft an opening into the server market. Eventually the server market will be either dominated by Windows or shared equally with Linux, anyway. Nobody's going to care if the proprietary UNIXes go away as long as the necessary features from them are available in Linux.

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    Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!