Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 06:06:06 -0500 (EST) From: "Brandon D. Valentine" <bandix@looksharp.net> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: <hiten@uk.FreeBSD.org>, <chat@FreeBSD.org>, <grog@FreeBSD.org>, <phk@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: IBM suing (was: RMS Suing was [SUGGESTION] - JFS for FreeBSD) Message-ID: <20011213051012.Y56723-100000@turtle.looksharp.net> In-Reply-To: <3C1875D6.5DE4F996@mindspring.com>
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On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Terry Lambert wrote: >As I said before: feel free to write the code. Just don't expect >people who, philosophically, want the FreeBSD code to be usable >(and used!) as a source of reference implementations to participate >in this process. That fact that this thread had to even exist is unforunate. We won't go into the GPL is evil aspect, since it's been pretty well covered elsewhere on the web by various people. I would mention that for all of the reasons mentioned herein porting JFS is, as should be obvious by now, a very risky project straddling ugly licensing issues. I also don't know what makes JFS a better candidate for porting than any of the other GPL'd filesystems. Those who have significant involvement with the Linux community will note that the Linux port of JFS doesn't get nearly as much publicity or high profile use as the Linux port of XFS. I can personally attest to the quality of the XFS code. If you go to: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/xfs_users.html you'll see a testimonial from my boss at the bottom of the page under the heading "Vanderbilt University Center for Structural Biology". Whether it was JFS or XFS, having a journaling file system port could be quite useful, even if it's not available as the root FS. For instance, with one of our large fileservers it would be a large win to be able to put FreeBSD on the system with the system drive running FFS w/ SoftUpdates, and attach a disk array to it which was using a journaling FS like XFS. The journaling is not as important on the system disk, in fact on most of those disk servers the system disk can die and be replaced within the hour since it's a pretty simple configuration. Where it's a real win is with the large filesystems. I know that NetBSD has begun hacking on LFS again, and seem to have it working reasonably well. I have not read the LFS papers so I'm not familiar with how comparable it would be to a system like JFS or XFS, but if someone who knows more about it would care to comment it might be interesting to see just how feasible it is as a solution for FreeBSD. It certainly has an attractive license. There also appears to be some various work scattered across the web on BSD filesystems which falls in between some of the cracks of this discussion, like this: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~stein/wafs/ One would also be curious if there are companies out there which might be persuaded to help out BSD with a journaling filesystem technology. For instance what is Compaq's stance on something like AdvFS: http://www.tru64unix.compaq.com/unix/advfs.html Or Auspex's stance on FastFlo: http://www.auspex.com/prod/software.html Or Novell's 64-bit journaling FS as part of their NSS offering? http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/search/searchtid.cgi?/2942686.htm (their website is pretty convoluted so I had trouble locating the whitepaper they used to have up) What about the HTFS (high throughput fs) journaling FS used in SCO OpenServer? Perhaps with Caldera's recent moves to open source part of the original AT&T unix sources, they might be persuaded to jump on the IBM/SGI/etc bandwagon and open source their journaling FS. Maybe they can be persuaded to use a BSD license on the merits that their journaling FS could become a standard like other BSD licensed code has done. AtheOS contains a journaling FS based on the BeFS design from the BeFS book. One wonders if either of these FSes could be made available under a suitable license. How about the Protected File System (PFS) from the Stein paper? http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix01/stein.html I don't have a Usenix membership to get at the paper or I'd comment further. Was there any sample code included and would it be feasible to remove the checksumming code while keeping the actual filesystem and journaling intact? Always looking for a good filesystem discussion, Brandon D. Valentine -- "Iam mens praetrepidans avet vagari." - G. Valerius Catullus, Carmina, XLVI To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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