Will XFS be adopted

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 12:04:41AM -0500, Dan wrote:
> James R. Van Artsdalen(james-freebsd-fs2 at jrv.org)@2008.11.16 20:35:37 -0600:
> > ZFS has limitations.
> > 
> > It is not appropriate for "appliance" applications such as the Soekris
> > boxes does due to memory consumption.
> YES! In my opinion it's not even appropriate for a machine with 2GB of
> RAM. Why waste so much RAM on an FS? Does anyone know? Or is this some
> sort of conspiracy to sell more bgger boxes. It's Sun, afterall....

Please.  If Sun's sole goal was to "sell bigger boxes", they wouldn't be
participating in the open-source world with OpenSolaris and helping
other OSes with getting ZFS.  None of those things tie you to Sun
hardware.

The ZFS caching concept as I see it is quite simple to understand: keep
as much data as possible in RAM, to decrease overall disk I/O (RAM is
significantly faster than disk).  There's other reasons (goals) as well,
but I'm trying to keep it simple.

The reality of the situation is that for most desktops and servers, you
can buy 4GB of RAM for something like US$25-30.  That's incredibly
inexpensive -- were you around back in the mid-90s when 2x4MB SIMMs cost
you US$200?  Or in the late 80s when a 1MB expansion card for the Apple
IIGS cost US$300?  I understand (really!) these things can't be compared
to an embedded platform, but the entire world does not use embedded
hardware.  Step back for a moment and reflect.

And you do realise that the memory requirements of ZFS can be tuned,
yes?  You can literally tell it "only use 16MB of memory for the ARC".

> > BTRFS will be another filesystem to watch.  Perhaps foreign filesystems
> > could be supported out of ports.  But the fundamental limitation, as was
> > said, is that someone has to care enough to do the port.
> 
> What kinda bugs me is why FreeBSD hasn't adopted a nice journaling FS
> until now. Look at Linux - Reiser, EXT3 and XFS/JFS have been in it for
> years. What gives with FreeBSD?

There's gjournal(8), which does journalling on a block level, meaning
you can use whatever FS you want atop it.

Also: if Linux has the things you want, use it!  Pick whichever OS gets
the job done for you, and meets your requirements.  If FreeBSD lacks
something which Linux has, and that something is important to you, going
with Linux is the correct choice.  The same applies to any OS, not just
Linux.  Its about having choices, and solving problems -- not about
blind OS advocacy.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |