XFS (read-only) support committed to CURRENT

[Bill Vermillion]

At Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 12:15 , our malformed and occasionally 
flatulent friend Matthias Andree spewed forth this fount of brain juice:

> 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?

> 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.

> 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.

If you check back far enough you'll see the XFS originally came
from SGI and was optimized for exceptionally large file systems and
had exceptionally high performance capabililites.  As I recall it
was out long before ext3fs and was it was probably close to 3 or 4
years before SGI changed platforms and also implemented XFS for
Linux. ISTR it came out with the IRIX 6.x system.   Tests they made
with over a million files in a directory showed almost no
perormance hits and block sizes over a megabyte long made it ideal
for the targest SGI was using as that time - such as real time
video streaming - such as the experimental Time/Warner experiment
here locally.  The 2TB storage they had online at that time was
huge - and that was almost 10 years ago.

This comment is in addtion to the ones others have made.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com