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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."

37 of 226 comments (clear)

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

    Who?

  2. 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?

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    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). ;)

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    9. Re:What's the point? by joib · · Score: 4, Funny

      So is ZFS, genius...

    10. 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.

    11. 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.

    12. 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
    13. Re:What's the point? by master5o1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I have a Merkle tree growing in my backyard.

      --
      signature is pants
    14. 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 ;-)
  3. 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?

  4. 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

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

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

  6. 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.

  7. 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 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!

    4. 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"

    5. 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.

  8. 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
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

  11. 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.

    --
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  12. 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.
  13. 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.

  14. 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.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  15. 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.