XFS (read-only) support committed to CURRENT

[Lars Erik Gullerud]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Matthias Andree wrote:

> Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc at crodrigues.org> writes:
>
>> Read-only XFS support has been committed to FreeBSD-CURRENT.
>> Write access to XFS is not supported at this time.
>> The XFS for FreeBSD source code is based off of GPL'd sources
>> provided by SGI.
>
> Hm. Does this mean that FreeBSD's XFS implementation is GPL'd like
> ext2fs is? If so, allow me a question why XFS was chosen in preference
> to ext3fs?

What do you mean by "chosen in preference to", the two are hardly mutually 
exclusive...? UFS2 is still FreeBSD's native filesystem, however FreeBSD 
also supports handling a range of other filesystems like ext2fs, NTFS, 
etc. - and now also XFS. If you happen to want/need ext3fs more than 
XFS then you can always add the required bits yourself and send patches, 
or pay someone to do it? Someone wanted XFS support, so someone went ahead 
and worked on it - not to the exclusion of any other filesystem that 
anyone else might want/need support for...

> Ext3fs appears to have some advantages, easy migration from and to
> ext2fs, shrinkable, data journalling, data ordering (write data blocks
> before the file metadata is written) and so on.

...and this has what to do with the fact that FreeBSD now supports XFS?

> I don't mean this should become an advocacy discussion, as XFS surely
> has advantages, too, real-time capability and so on - but ext2fs is
> already there and has write support.

Then use ext2fs. Isn't the availability of multiple choices great?

/leg