Re: Plans for 1.8+ (2.0?)

[Michael Neumann <mneumann@xxxxxxxx>]

Rupert Pigott wrote:

> On Thu, 01 Feb 2007 09:39:30 -0500, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:
> 
>> Sort of.  I'm saying that if Matt rolls his own filesystem instead of
>> using ZFS, that new filesystem is either:
>> 
>> 1: not going to have the variety of tools available with zfs for handling
>> things like disk pooling/snapshots/data scrubbing/insert zfs term here.
> 
> Of course writing these things takes time, but from what I understand
> of Matt's approach to this problem I think it will be possible to
> leverage existing tools for most of the essential housekeeping operations.
> This is a good thing, it means that people don't have to learn new stuff
> to use the system.

I like the idea that Matt is writing a new filesystem (even if it takes a
lot time to complete). As I don't plan to run a big cluster in the near
future (at least not on my laptop :), will this new filesystem be usable to
run on a single machine? Will it have advantages over ufs, e.g. dynamic
space allocation (as found in zfs)? Or would I need to use ufs for that and
the new one in a cluster environment?

There's another thing this new filesystem could solve: Easy incremental
backups (especially of mobile computers). Imagine you go out with your
laptop, work, and come back home. As your laptop could get stolen the next
time you go out, or it might get destroyed etc., it would be nice to just
plug-in at home and run an incremental backup of the filesystem (well it
can be done with cpdup/rsync as well, but you'd lose history of changes).

I think it should be already possible with the journaling stuff Matt added
just by buffering the journal on harddisk.


Regards,

  Michael