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Tux3 File System Could Finally Make It Into the Mainline Linux Kernel

Posted by Soulskill on from the voted-onto-the-island dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Tux3 file-system that's been in development since 2008 as the public replacement to the patent-blocked Tux2 file-system is now under review for inclusion into the Linux kernel. Tux3 tries to act as a 'light, tight, modern file-system. We offer a fresh approach to some ancient problems,' according to its lead developer, Daniel Phillips. Tux3 strives for minimal resource consumption but lacks enterprise-grade reliability at this point. Tux3, at the end of the day, tries to be 'robust, fast, and simple' with the Linux FS reportedly being as fast as other well known file-systems. Details on the project are at Tux3.org."

121 comments

  1. Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by haruchai · · Score: 3, Insightful

    and they expect to be competitive with ZFS?? They have a LOT of work to do.

    --
    Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    1. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      and they expect to be competitive with ZFS?? They have a LOT of work to do.

      It's just another run of the mill linux filesystem which is to say completely useless.
      The only real viable filesystems on linux are XFS, followed by EXT 4 and BTRFS (only in experimental form).

    2. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Bengie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's a worthy goal to have. We need more competition in the FS sector. Many times competition is the inspiration for new features, even if some of these FS don't even make it off the ground. ZFS is great, but it's not perfect, and they only have so many resources to throw at new ideas to test. Monoculture is never a good thing.

    3. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by bheading · · Score: 1

      On the contrary. What we have in filesystems at the moment is fragmentation.

      We need people pitching in with stabilizing and fixing one major FS in Linux. It looks to me as if that should be btrfs.

    4. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Bengie · · Score: 2, Insightful

      btrfs is interesting, but it's taking a long time to get anywhere and it has some big backers. I've also read some really well written blogs from sysadmins who have been Unix admins since the beginning of time, and they had some really good examples of some "Features" of btrfs that a sysadmin should never-ever use under any circumstance, and some features that are half-asses that are nearly a requirement for any good sysadmin, but cannot be done because of those other "bad" features.

      One such example is btrfs allows a volume to be mounted under multiple parents. In order to handle this "awesome" feature, they had to give up the ability to atomically snapshot across volumes. In ZFS, if you mount a volume under another volume and snapshot the parent, the children will automatically be atomically included, not so with btrfs, that's an impossibility to add a feature that should never be used.

    5. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Different aims.

    6. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by dbIII · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I disagree. The different approach of ZFS means it should be far better than btrfs when you have many disks, yet it makes almost no sense at all with single disks which is where btrfs makes sense.
      Different tools for different jobs.

    7. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by philip.paradis · · Score: 1

      I only use XFS and ZFS on Linux these days, with exception of ext2 on some /boot volumes. Nobody has shown me a compelling reason to deviate from what works.

      --
      Write failed: Broken pipe
    8. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > ZFS is great, but it's not perfect

      Serious question: I'm curious as to what those would be?

      The license?

    9. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by cmurf · · Score: 1

      What blogs discuss btrfs features that should never be used under any circumstances?

      Could you elaborate on your example? I not understanding what commands make it possible to mount a volume "under multiple parents" how this differs from shared or bind mounts. I can mount an XFS volume on two separate mountpoints, not a big deal. Btrfs volumes can't be snapshot, just their subvolumes, maybe that's what you're referring to? The lack of recursively snapshotable nested subvolumes?

      Btrfs and ZFS are different when it comes to snapshots. In Btrfs snapshots are subvolumes that are "prefilled". They aren't otherwise unique like they are on ZFS. And that means there isn't really a parent child relationship on Btrfs, you can delete "parent" subvolumes that have "child" snapshots, unlike on ZFS.

    10. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I used btrfs for a year or so on a server of mine and it seemed fine for a while, but the last six months it just would lose its mind on the PC every few weeks with daemons zombified that prevented me from even rebooting the system -- I couldn't unmount or sync the damn thing because the btrfs helper processes were stuck. The btrfs-tools would segfault, luckily I found a newer version that I had to compile from source that could check the volume so I could get it back online.

      I don't trust btrfs at all at this point; when they say it's not ready for prime time, they mean it. My own fault for not taking them literally. I didn't lose any data as a result, thank $diety the current tools were able to clean up the filesystem. But it wasn't worth the sleepless nights where I had to consider whether it was worth it trying to salvage a 'corrupted' drive full of files, or just give up and reformat.

      Now I just use ext3/4, BTSync and backintime to roll my own backups and mirrors. I didn't ever really use the snapshot features anyway.

    11. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anecdata sucks.

      I've been using BTRFS on my laptop without any data-loss issues for about four years now, and my other home machines for about one. In the early days I certainly had some issues that required me to take down the system and play around with unlink, cat, and friends for a while (those ENOSPC issues were super annoying!), and there was a nasty bug in 3.10.0 or maybe 3.11.0 or so, so I wouldn't unconditionally recommend it for production systems.

      But, for me, on the balance, it's been good. Volume snapshots are a great way to get a consistent view of a system for making live backups. COW is a great way to save a ton of space when making stuff like per-application Wine installations.

    12. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 1

      Indeed, different aims. Tux3 has the modest goal of being a light, tight and fast filesystem without ambition of also being a volume manager.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    13. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by nctritech · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is probably irrelevant for you, but I ran into issues with software running on i386 with XFS and newer kernels. Programs not compiled with -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 used the 32-bit versions of certain file-related system calls, and the default mount options for XFS changed at some point to allow 64-bit inode numbers to be created. What would happen is the program would readdir and choke the instant it hit a file or directory on an inode number greater than 2^32; the fstat calls returned EOVERFLOW and processing aborted. You'd go into a directory with GQView, for example, and mysteriously see i.e. three images and one directory where you knew there were tens of directories and hundreds of images.

      Obviously, x86_64 platforms don't have this issue, but I was operating an i386 server since 2008 until just a few months ago and I found it to be extremely annoying and (at first) difficult to figure out what was happening. There is surprisingly little information about XFS and 64-bit file syscall issues when all you have is strace spouting EOVERFLOW at you and don't immediately pin the issue to the filesystem in use.

    14. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by sjames · · Score: 2

      There are valid reasons to want to mount a volume in more than one place. For example, strong namespace based isolation for sensitive processes/users.

      Over all, btrfs is much more flezible than ZFS. In the end, it looks like it will be the superior filesystem. For example, it has a much greater flexibility in changing the underlying storage over time. Why should gradually upgrading the underlying pool be a disruptive process. It seems natural that as drives age out to replace them with bigger drives. Ideally, the filesystem will move things around as needed to maintain the specified level of redundancy and to utilize as much of the new storage as possible.

      I am currently using ZFS because btrfs isn't yet sufficiently mature, especially wrt redundancy

    15. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by sjames · · Score: 2

      The license is an annoyance, but can be lived with, more or less.

      I would like to see more flexibility in re-structuring the zpool. I see no intrinsic reason why a pool can't start out without redundancy and then have it added after the fact (the equivilent of bringing a soft raid up in degraded mode and adding in the other devices later) or have the geometry changed later. It should be perfectly feasible to start small and over time add more disks and replace small disks with larger ones. I would really like to be able to evacuate a disk before pulling and replacing it (given enough free capacity elsewhere in the pool.

    16. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by philip.paradis · · Score: 1

      That's a darn good find, and definitely a really annoying issue. You're correct that 99% of the stuff I manage is x86-64; I've only got a couple of legacy x86 systems floating around, and fortunately in this case they don't use XFS. I can only imagine the amount of $head_desk you went through before realizing what the root cause was in the case you described.

      --
      Write failed: Broken pipe
    17. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I tried btrfs as the default file system on Fedora 20 in a virtualbox VM. Tried enabling quota on /home and it crashed and corrupted the whole volume. Reinstalled, tried again, same thing.

      Now maybe I'm doing it wrong, because I find the userland tools for btrfs to be a complete dog's breakfast. The ideology behind the interface I just "don't get", while ZFS makes perfect sense to me and is very intuitive.

      So far, not liking brtfs.

    18. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ZFS on a single disk can always detect disk corruption and report it to you. Supposedly, BTRFS also has some checksums but they are not proven safe. There are in fact several research papers on ZFS' ability to fight data corruption - and ZFS is the only solution that successfully detects and repair data corruption. There is no research on BTRFS so I would not trust it to much. Read the wikipedia ZFS article for research papers. If you use "copies=2", then ZFS can also repair data corruption on a single disk. BTRFS can not do that, I think. It was only recently raid was added to BTRFS.

    19. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by palion · · Score: 1

      "Monoculture is never a good thing." Sentences with "sth. is never/always X" are generally not trustworthy... Always doubt. Maybe monoculture sometimes IS a good thing, who knows?

      --
      Well, well
    20. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Try it with lots (16 GB) of small (less than 64 KB) files. The metadata will bloat larger than the actual data, and you'll get OMGWTFBBQ moments when it tells you it is out of space while at the same time reporting multiple GB of free space, then try to balance it, and have the balance hang because there's not enough "real" free space, and have to wipe the FS and start over. btrfs is NOT ready. Not even close.

    21. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      btrfs could be the TransLattice of filesystems. That'll be cool, but it ain't even close to ready yet. The bugs may be infrequent at this point, but catastrophic is catastrophic, regardless of frequency.

    22. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      There are more i/o workloads and problem domains than the enterprise grade storage system that zfs is designed for. Its like declaring that the Honda fit can never compete with a dump truck.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    23. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      Memory requirements, for one. ZFS is probably a terrible choice for tizen, or firefox os, or raspbian.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    24. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by haruchai · · Score: 1

      This particular Honda Fit is not even properly assembled so it couldn't even bring a new set of tires for the dump truck.
      Did you miss the part where it was stated "and a tertiary goal is to be better than ZFS"
      The implication is that it will eventually be a ZFS replacement. My point is that they are so far behind and have accomplished so little to date, that will NEVER happen.

      If they prove me wrong, good for them. I'm always on the lookout for a better tool or way to do things but I stand by my remark that this project is going nowhere fast.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    25. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by ruir · · Score: 1

      Quite interesting your insight and finding. One more argument for me to complete my migration to 64-bits. Many thanks!

    26. Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      Yes, I did miss that part where they pointed to zfs as an aspiration. Strange, weird, and just wrong.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
  2. TFS misses one point by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Informative

    From TFA: "Tux3 is yet another interesting open-source file-system designed for specialized cases."

  3. NIHFS? by BaronM · · Score: 4, Interesting

    First off, I think that 'better than ZFS' is a good and legitimate goal, seeing as how ZFS is very, very good, but not perfect.

    That said, there's also BTFS and HAMMER aiming to be 'better than ZFS'.

    I know: everyone wants to scratch their own itch, and there is no reason that multiple projects in the same area should necessarily been see as competing, and if I'm unhappy about it, I should just go write my own instead of complaining. Did I cover everything? :)

    I just wonder sometimes if Linux wouldn't have moved beyond EXT4, X11, and the desktop environment wars if the 'not invented here' syndrome were just a little less prevalent.

    1. Re:NIHFS? by grub · · Score: 0


      When anything has a claim to fame of "trying to be better than $GOLD_STANDARD", I am skeptical. There must be very compelling reasons to not just stick with what is tried and true. ZFS is the cat's meow, "trying to be better than" when we're talking about something as critical as a filesystem... I'll wait and see, thanks.

      --
      Trolling is a art,
    2. Re:NIHFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      this is not the only weasel word infested post by you to this same article.
      who claims that zfs is $GOLD_STANDARD? and which version of zfs
      are you talking about? oracle keeps putting out incompatible versions, and
      then there are the various opensolaris and bsd verions. ... saying $GOLD_STANDARD
      implies something that is clearly not true --- that there is "a" zfs.

    3. Re:NIHFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I can see Tux3 used in some special cases, but there are so many filesystems that should be tossed in the Linux kernel first, IMHO. A few thoughts/ideas:

      1: A successor for SquashFS except with the option of some ECC to detect corruption and optionally to fix it. That way, a compressed image can be somewhat self-healing.

      2: Hooks for ZFS on Linux. Because of the license differences, it can't be included into the kernel proper, but might as well make it as easy as possible to have it used on bootup, perhaps as a root filesystem.

      3: Not really a filesystem, but extensions to LVM3 to give features similar to products like UnRAID. That way, one can have a drive dedicated for parity, a drive as a write "landing zone", autotiering, hot spares, encryption on that level, etc.

      4: A filesystem designed for WORM, with each set of writes cryptographically signed, perhaps with signed hashes from an external timestamping service. Similar to UDF, except with cryptography and maybe even error correction so if there is damage, it can be repaired. That way, it will be hard to tamper with the FS unless it is zeroed and rewritten or rolled back from snapshots. This way, removable hard drives can be used for archival storage and there is protection from tampering.

    4. Re:NIHFS? by Bengie · · Score: 4, Interesting

      OpenZFS. They're getting rid of "versions" and just having "Feature flags". This will allow you to create ZFS pools on one system, and just make sure what ever features that are only supported on another target system, are enable when you create the pool.

    5. Re:NIHFS? by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 0

      should necessarily been see

      I'll bite. What's your native language? To a native speaker of English, that would have been "should necessarily be seen".

      But attaching the tense to the "to be" isn't totally out of bounds in some languages. I think.

      So, what language did you grow up thinking in?

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    6. Re:NIHFS? by BaronM · · Score: 2

      Apparently, I grew up speaking 'typo'.

      I suspect it's an editing error where I was writing in present tense (be seen as...), started a switch to past tense (been seen as...), and instead ended up with that ridiculous construction.

      Oops.

    7. Re:NIHFS? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      I just wonder sometimes if Linux wouldn't have moved beyond EXT4, X11, and the desktop environment wars if the 'not invented here' syndrome were just a little less prevalent.

      The EXT* have been the only native filesystems of Linux, and BTRFS is something recent. With ZFS, the issue is an incompatible license, since CDDL code can't legally be combined w/ GPL code. Wayland again is new and likely to be the standard, aside from Ubuntu Unity, which will use Mir, and Android, which uses SurfaceFlinger

      I do agree that there is a plethora of DEs. In the beginning, there was just KDE. Between that, and FOSS ports of CDE or Motif/OpenLook, they'd have been fine. Then came GNOME (due to the controversy over Qt licensing) and then a number of others. I do think that too much development effort is put into developing something that's already plentiful in the market.

      File systems - not too many. You have ext2,3,4, and then you have file systems that have come from elsewhere - XFS from SGI, ReiserFS (the butt of all the dead wife jokes), VjFS from Veritas and that's about it. In the BSDs, you have UFS and the BSD FFS, and in addition to that, HAMMER/HAMMER2 and ZFS, that's come from Solaris.

  4. As an old OpenVMS fan, this isn't... by Nutria · · Score: 2

    what I think of when someone writes "versioning filesystem".

    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    1. Re:As an old OpenVMS fan, this isn't... by MichaelSmith · · Score: 1

      As versioning goes, FILES-11 was barely good enough to be called built in un-delete. Nowhere near as good as just checking all your files into git.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
    2. Re:As an old OpenVMS fan, this isn't... by Nutria · · Score: 1

      As versioning goes, FILES-11 was barely good enough to be called built in un-delete.

      Mainly because -- in my 25 years using FILES-11 -- I've never heard of versioning called "undelete".

      "Persistent undo" is the best term to describe going back to a prior file version.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  5. At least... by warrax_666 · · Score: 0

    At least it'll be moving past X11 in a year or two :). But then people with no understanding are arguing that Wayland is NIH-X11 -- it's so confusing having to understand nuance!

    --
    HAND.
    1. Re:At least... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most ppl don't have a problem with Wayland just so long as good ol' X11 can be subbed in its place. It gets problematic when choice is reduced. I've already jumped distros to avoid systemd and upstart. I'll jump again if the distro I use doesn't give me a choice.

    2. Re:At least... by dbIII · · Score: 1

      But then people with no understanding

      That's a bit rich after some of your earlier posts about X and Wayland. I suggest you join the wayland mailing list and get some understanding before making such comments.

  6. parent delays by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So tux2 was ready in 2000, and it took 14 years to rewrite it to avoid parents? Oh how much patents help innovation!

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    1. Re:parent delays by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So tux2 was ready in 2000, and it took 14 years to rewrite it to avoid parents? Oh how much patents help innovation!

      Few more years and those patents will expire and we can use both!

    2. Re:parent delays by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Funny

      took 14 years to rewrite it to avoid parents!

      A lot of these linux developers are pretty young.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
    3. Re:parent delays by NotInHere · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Politicians could at least recognize the faster pace in the IT world compared to other technology industries, and lessen the patent terms for software patents.

      I also don't know why there should be a difference between a patent troll and a large company with lots of 'defensive' patents suing other companies because of "swipe to unlock" features.

    4. Re:parent delays by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      That's lucky, it took me 18 years to get free of my parents. Although it might be more accurately described as, "they kicked me out of the house." But let's not go there.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re:parent delays by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Daniel Phillips is a fool who hasn't learned not to do nice things for scummy people.

    6. Re:parent delays by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 3, Informative

      So tux2 was ready in 2000, and it took 14 years to rewrite it to avoid parents? Oh how much patents help innovation!

      Few more years and those patents will expire and we can use both!

      Tux3 is a better design. Tux2 was more along the lines of ZFS and Btrfs, that is, multiply-rooted trees sharing subtrees. Tux3 is a single tree with exactly one pointer to each extent. Considerably easier to check and repair. Of course we need to see if it turns out that way so please stay tuned.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    7. Re:parent delays by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      By now those patents has expired. so e van go back to tux2 and scrap the rubbish written in last 14 years...

    8. Re:parent delays by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, if Tux2 offered anything innovative, it wouldn't have hit that patent wall.
      Patents == someont beat you to the punch and did it before you.

  7. Could any of the authors get away with murder? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's an unlikely but relevant question when considering Linux filesystems.

    1. Re:Could any of the authors get away with murder? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      looks like a linux-in-drones-means-devs-are-murderers troll has been born.

    2. Re:Could any of the authors get away with murder? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Close, but no cigar (said the drone pilot).

      Hint: It was only 2006 - how young are /.ers these days?

    3. Re:Could any of the authors get away with murder? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK, found it :)

      Holy reiserfsck, how bizzare, how fscking bizarre.

      By that time I had my fun with a visual Microsoft product.

      So the /.ers all have worked with mainframes and such?

    4. Re:Could any of the authors get away with murder? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was thinking "hey! it can't be 2006, that's like a decade ago, I clearly remember reading about KillerFS the day I met my wife! Oh... I see... Now I feel old."
      Now get off my lawn!

      PS: For those wondering, my wife is alive and well. And yes this post is intended to hurt anyone who's older than me.

  8. ZFS or fail by grub · · Score: 1


    Come to the 21st century, use ZFS.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:ZFS or fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      yes, if zfs worked correctly, it would be the ultimate evolution of 70s technology --- a non-distributed file system that may take an indeterminate time to export and recover. but it doesn't. i've seen customers lose lots of data with zfs. i have not had this experience with other file systems.

    2. Re:ZFS or fail by Bengie · · Score: 1

      I've never heard of anyone ever losing data with ZFS, even people with petabytes of R&D data.

    3. Re: ZFS or fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is nothing in ZFS that prevents your data to be scrambled. What ZFS provides is knowledge that the data has been scrambled so you don't suffer silent data corruption.

    4. Re: ZFS or fail by Bengie · · Score: 1

      And it uses that detection to fix the bad data from good data from your other RAID drives. Not just using one drive, right? Can't blame the FS for mistakes of the user, you also can't blame the FS for really bad luck. The Earth blew up when the Sun went super-nova. ZFS is a bad FS because it didn't protect my data.

    5. Re:ZFS or fail by dbIII · · Score: 1

      It doesn't entirely save you from failing disk controllers but does warn you that it is going on. I've lost four files that way, all new multi-GB temporary files that were easily recreated or no longer required, but it does happen when you keep failing systems limping along until the replacement arrives.

    6. Re: ZFS or fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you have RAID 1, RAID-Z2 or RAID-Z3, yes. It will fix it. RAID-Z will not fix bit rot, and a zpool scrub will definitely tell you that.

    7. Re: ZFS or fail by cbreak · · Score: 1

      Any type of redundancy is enough to fix errors, as long as you have at least one correct copy. raidz has one copy redundancy, raidz2 has two copies redundancy, and mirrored drives have as much redundancy as you want.

  9. Clearly by smittyoneeach · · Score: 1, Funny

    The way ZFS saved Sun marks it as an über-technology.

    Since Trolling is an art, and stuff.

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    1. Re:Clearly by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Being seen to be worth being eaten by a larger fish is not a sign of failure in technology companies.

  10. It's old and mature -- so let's come up by fisted · · Score: 2

    ..with something new already.

    Is the general problem of the GNU- and Linux world.

    --
    CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    1. Re:It's old and mature -- so let's come up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, because that NEVER happens with any other piece of software/license,

  11. Backstory by eclectro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is the story of the patents involved. It's not so much that there was any litigation, but rather the ongoing threat that there would be (for arguably stuff that was already being done.)

    --
    Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
  12. Untested and unused always tests as faster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Systems that no one uses always test out faster than ones that actually work, deal with edge cases, do reliable recovery from hard crashes, etc. That's why ReiserFS was always faster, but kept hiding the corpses in the woods and pretending complete ignorance of having destroyed your data.

                http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

    Come on, how could you not trust yet another "fan boi" burdened filesystem that's never been been shown as stable?

  13. Waste of time and effort by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Aw, come one.

    A local file system won't really rock one's boat anymore these days. Today it's all about global namespace and distribtuted file systems, ideally made highly available and replicated synchronously in real time on kernel level.

    This one was a real waste of time and developer resources.

    1. Re:Waste of time and effort by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 1

      Those shiny distributed file systems run on top of boring local filesystems.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
  14. Choice by warrax_666 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh, please. A modern Linux distro actually needs to provide hotplug that actually works, a tear-free desktop experience, reliable service termination/startup/restarts, etc.

    Stop living in the past.

    --
    HAND.
    1. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To each their own. I'm more interested in simplicity and stability than in shiney. I think that a lot of people are, too. If that's "living in the past", then bring it on and bring more of it.

    2. Re:Choice by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      If you haven't noticed, he *was* talking about simplicity. Just the MIT type, not the New Jersey one.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Choice by Bengie · · Score: 1

      If you don't like shiney, then there's always the console. For everyone else who likes desktops for stuff like videos or web browsing, annoyances like tearing is a distraction, like a 3 year old throwing a temper tantrum. Tearing was an issue fixed back in the 90s.

    4. Re:Choice by causality · · Score: 1, Troll

      If you don't like shiney, then there's always the console. For everyone else who likes desktops for stuff like videos or web browsing, annoyances like tearing is a distraction, like a 3 year old throwing a temper tantrum. Tearing was an issue fixed back in the 90s.

      I've used X11 and later Xorg for about the last 15 years. I've never had issues with tearing or any other visual artifacts. Back in the day I certainly had a real good time with modelines (fun!) but I've never had problems with tearing.

      Am I the only one who hears complaints like this and scratches his head wondering what the fuss is all about? Lots of these mysterious complaints have never happened to me. I don't believe you are being dishonest, I just would like a more in-depth explanation about what problem you had, what solutions you tried that didn't work, and what you think the working solution would or should be.

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
    5. Re:Choice by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      So what's you're saying is that a modern Linux distro should be more like FreeBSD?

    6. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Try using screen rotation.

    7. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Amen to that. Actually that's something that every OS should do. Yesterday I spent 4 hours trying to solve tearing in Windows 7. No luck. Three monitors and two of them are upright. An don't get me started on the drivers since I'm using two different GFX cards. Took hours just to figure out how to which drivers I need to get all of them working. Funny thing is that I used Linux Mint to find out if the setup will eventually work in Windows. Linux Mint just booted and I had three monitor working just like that. Also (except setting two monitors to portrait) worked instantly. Microsoft should catch up. It is not even funny anymore.

    8. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Xorg is exactly as broken on the BSDs as it's on linux :(

    9. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Changing screen rotation should be trivial with xrandr or your favorite DEs display control widget.
      Though as other ACs mentioned, Xorg + RandR rotation = guaranteed tearing.

    10. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, please. A modern Linux distro actually needs to provide hotplug that actually works, a tear-free desktop experience, reliable service termination/startup/restarts, etc.

      Stop living in the past.

      Lots of people forget that some other people use Linux for work and have chosen Linux for the server features. At least design new features the way so they don't ruin old reliable and useful stuff. Pulling windows from remote machines is much nicer when you don't have to transfer the whole desktop and can arrange the windows the way you like. Switching between multiple rdp/vnc session is really hampering and feels like win8 metro.

      Systemd could work if the startup would be more flexible. They could at least allow for some of the stuff on mounted filesystems. The old start styles had post-mount and post-network points.

      I don't mind new features, but check for regressions please. A lot of breakage is unneeded.

    11. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even with that, I've had no problems.

      The capcha is funny: terrible.

    12. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What card/drivers/xorg?
      I've been trying to find a tear-free portrait-landscape-portrait setup for... about 4 years.

    13. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Reliability does not mean "one process to rule them all". I use Linux to have control, and systemd wants to take away every last shred of control. Poettering can take a PCB with systemd-on-a-chip and shove it up his ass.

    14. Re:Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Funnily enough, my experience has been the opposite: I got three monitor working quickly in Windows 7, and Mint had issues, and continues to do wonky things.

  15. Waste of time and effort by DF5JT · · Score: 0

    Aw, come on.

    A local file system won't really rock one's boat anymore these days. Today it's all about global name space and distributed file systems, ideally made highly available and replicated synchronously in real time on kernel level.

    This one was a real waste of time and developer resources.

  16. YASF (c) forver by me by FlyingGuy · · Score: 2

    YASF or Yet Another File System.

    Well someone has yet another personal project they want us all to take seriously. Really? I mean Really?

    Of the numerous file systems out there, and I have tried a whole boat load of them, the one that is the most mature, most reliable, arguably the fastest is... Wait for it... From the company that everyone loves to hate...

    Is NSS from Novell. It has more posix features then all of the rest of them, it is insanely fast, it provides undelete and complete repeatability and Novell has open sourced it. Nuff said.

    --
    Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
    1. Re:YASF (c) forver by me by flux · · Score: 2

      Not sure if trolling.. but I looked it up, and on the paper it seems interesting, but for use today it has limitations: 2 TB maximum device size, 8 TB maximum volume size. So that's a non-contender. Seems quite advanced for its day, though (introduced 1998).

    2. Re:YASF (c) forver by me by FlyingGuy · · Score: 1

      Nope, not trolling..

      Since it is open source and has all those goodies it would seem to me that increasing the volume size capabilities would not be nearly as tall an order as starting over from scratch.

      --
      Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
    3. Re:YASF (c) forver by me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      > YASF or Yet Another File System.

      Woldn't that be "Yet Another Sile Fystem"? Or something?

      Look: I don't know who this Flying Guy is nor what he has done for me recently. But Daniel Philips... this is an awesomely smart guy, and friendly and all. And he has contributed to free software which I use every day.

      Now imagine how much weight your rant has in my eyes. This might be a view shared by many.

  17. Choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    lol, anybody else read that as "buttplug"?

    Oh, please. A modern Linux distro actually needs to provide buttplug that actually works, a tear-free desktop experience, reliable service termination/startup/restarts, etc.

  18. FS for fanboys....meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So those of use who work for a living, you use what is supported by your vendor. Shocking! So guess what I run, whatever is shipped with RedHat.

    BTW, I have never run an X desktop on any server in production. I just need a decent SSH client. The desktop wars amuse me.

  19. Too little, too late. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hmm ... Is it relevant at all?

  20. Re:K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Andrew Peter Kowalsky (APK) needs to go away.

  21. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  22. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  23. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  24. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  25. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  26. K. S. Kyosuke can't backup his b.s. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Apk's simply directly confronting a name tossing prick (K.S. Kyosuke) who earned this.

    1. Re:K. S. Kyosuke can't backup his b.s. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, you're just being a fucking faggot. Get the fuck out.

  27. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  28. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  29. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  30. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  31. K. S. Kyosuke gets called out & ran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

  32. Ready for mainline? by rew · · Score: 1

    To be taken serously, the home page needs to mention something more recent than 2008 in the "on the web" section. And the "we're active, see the git log" link needs to point somewhere other than a 404....

    1. Re:Ready for mainline? by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the bug report :)

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    2. Re:Ready for mainline? by rew · · Score: 1

      Daniel phillips, where have I heard that name before? It was in the last few days.... :-) Ah! :-)

  33. versioning by allo · · Score: 1

    what about the cleanup?
    Nilfs2 is quite cool, but the cleaner-daemon causes a lot of disk io, which is not only annoying, but makes me think about disk lifetime as well.

    1. Re:versioning by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Tux3 does not need a cleaner. At the moment, Tux3 also does not have snapshots. When it does, it still won't need a cleaner, although snapshot delete will run in the background because many inodes may need to be updated. This only touches metadata, which is normally less than 1/100th of the volume so it should be OK: some activity after the snapshot delete, but otherwise, changes commit immediately to disk then the disk goes quiet.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.