Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 11:25:15 -0500 (CDT) From: overby@rrnet.com (Glen Overby) To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: XFS Message-ID: <200009291625.LAA41951@zhadum.americas.sgi.com>
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[ I read this list via a mail-to-news gateway so I might be a bit
behind on discussions ]
tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert) flamed:
> I have talked to SGI's chief scientist about the license,
SGI is afraid of competitors (Sun, HP, etc) porting XFS to their own
proprietary OS. In a sick sort of way, the GPL protects SGI from
that. You won't see a non-GPL XFS coming from SGI. Sorry.
> anything at all. He also didn't seem to get that any
> improvements coming from the community would not be
> allowed to be integrated back into IRIX, unless all of
I'm disappointed to see you take the opinions & attitudes of one chief
as being representative of everyone here.
But many of us do "get it". One of the plans is/was to request
copyright assignment for contributions that we want to move back to
Irix. I haven't heard of that happening, but I do believe that the
(few) external contributions were incorporated into the Linux XFS
source tree.
This works because Irix XFS and Linux XFS are completely separate
source trees. I've seen what they did to XFS to work around the
things that Linux didn't have and to do big endian / little endian
translation. I'm hoping those never make it back into Irix.
There's no reason you couldn't have a small FFS root filesystem, load
XFS as a kernel module from that filesystem and use XFS for your big
filesystems. BTW, isn't FreeBSD all loadable kernel modules now? If
so, maybe it could be loaded at boot time.
No, I won't pay for the defense lawyers when FSF sues :-)
> I rather think they don't believe that they will get
> improvements that they care about from the community;
> either this is hubris ("we're professionals, not hackers!"),
> a loss leader, or it's just a way to get into the press.
While the chief you talked to may have not quite understood how to
work with others, that doesn't reflect the attitudes others working on
Linux XFS.
As for SGI's future, XFS is "free" (as free as any GPLed code gets)
and thus is no longer tied to SGI's future. If "the community" wants
to continue with it after the demise you're predicting, they're free
to do so.
BTW, thanks for sending out this flame. It reminded me why I stopped
trying to do contribute to FreeBSD years ago.
des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav) flamed:
> 1) SGI decided to port XFS to Linux mainly to ride the wave.
SGI agreed to open source XFS after several individuals inside the
company convinced certain executives to do so. The individials'
intent was to help Linux. The executives' decisions may not have been
as altruistic.
> 2) there is no FreeBSD version because XFS was proprietary until the
> first beta was released a few days ago, so noone had access to
Wrong. XFS escaped from the lawyer's grasp several months ago and has
been available from OSS.sgi.com since then. I think a tarball was
done of only the initial code; since then you need to use CVS.
> 3) it's interesting to note that SGI would probably have had an
> easier time porting XFS to FreeBSD than to Linux; most of the
> caveats listed on that page would not apply to FreeBSD.
I thought so, too, at first. In retrospect thats not true.
FreeBSD vnodes != Irix vnodes
FreeBSD virtual memroy != Irix virtual memory
FreeBSD buffer cache != Irix buffer cache
FWIW, there are two people in the XFS group who run FreeBSD at home.
We'd love to have the time to port XFS to FreeBSD (or, like Linux,
we'd love to port FreeBSD to XFS :-) If anyone wants to give a port a
try, I'll try to answer [technical :-)] questions you have about XFS.
Glen Overby
I don't speak for SGI.
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