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The Hairy State of Linux Filesystems
RazvanM writes "Do the OSes really shrink? Perhaps the user space (MySQL, CUPS) is getting slimmer, but how about the internals? Using as a metric the number of external calls between the filesystem modules and the rest of the Linux kernel I argue that this is not the case. The evidence is a graph that shows the evolution of 15 filesystems from 2.6.11 to 2.6.28 along with the current state (2.6.28) for 24 filesystems. Some filesystems that stand out are: nfs for leading in both number of calls and speed of growth; ext4 and fuse for their above-average speed of growth and 9p for its roller coaster path."
Two things of note with NFS...
1. NFSv4 support was added. v4 is complex and has a lot of authentication stuff in it that wasn't in v3.
2. SunRPC is "part" of the NFS tree, but is effectively just a transport layer. It is completely abstracted, hence the numbers of symbols. It could be used for other stuff, so it pushes up that number too.
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1. The AC was a satire. In fact, I remember reading those exact lines at least once before. Its actually quite funny, so props to the original troll for making something really nice to read.
2. ntfs-3g should be all you need to handle read/writes in Linux these days. I think its nested on top of fuse, so you'll probably need it as well. (Side note, glad Linus finally caved on allowing fuse into his kernel releases)
3. WinFS is a meta-layer on top of NTFS, so not in itself a disk file-system.
Bye!
Off topic, but just in case anyone is curious as to how Hans Reiser is doing in prison...
Not particularly well so far: http://www.kcbs.com/pages/3634907.php?