Whither XFS? (was: Congrats Marcelo)

Daniel Phillips (phillips@bonn-fries.net)
Mon, 25 Feb 2002 01:28:55 +0100


On February 26, 2002 11:59 pm, Steve Lord wrote:
> Yes jfs went in cleanly, because they reimplemented their filesystem
> from the ground up, and had a large budget to do it. XFS does not fit
> so cleanly because we brought along some features other filesystems did
> not have:
>
> o Posix ACL support

Are you able to leverage the new EA interface? (Which I still don't like
because of the namespace syntax embedded in the attribute names, btw,
please don't misinterpret silence as happiness.)

> o The ability to do online filesystem dumps which are coherent with
> the system call interface

It would be nice if some other filesystems could share that mechanism, do
you think it's feasible? If not, what's the stumbling block? I haven't
looked at this for some time and there's was some furious work going on
exactly there just before 2.5. It seems we've at least progressed a
little from the viewpoint that nobody would want that.

> o delayed allocation of file data

Andrew Morton is working on generic delayed allocation at the vfs level I
believe, why not bang heads with him and see if it can be made to work with
VFS?

> o DMAPI

It would be nice to have unsucky file events. But there's been roughly zero
discussion of dmapi on lkml as far as I can see.

> As it is we did all of these, and we seem to have half the Linux NAS
> vendors in the world building xfs into their boxes.

True enough.

-- 
Daniel
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