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

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."

Comments

Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs

[haruchai]

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

Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs

[Bengie]

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.

Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs

[nctritech]

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.

TFS misses one point

[NotInHere]

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

NIHFS?

[BaronM]

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.

Re:NIHFS?

[Bengie]

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.

parent delays

[KiloByte]

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

Re:parent delays

[MichaelSmith]

took 14 years to rewrite it to avoid parents!

A lot of these linux developers are pretty young.

Re:parent delays

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

Backstory

[eclectro]

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.)

Choice

[warrax_666]

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.