GSoC proposition: multiplatform UFS2 driver

[Julio Merino]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 2:48 AM, Richard Yao <ryao at gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 03/12/2014 12:54 PM, CeDeROM wrote:
>> My proposition is to create universal UFS2 driver that would work on
>> Windows, Linux, and maybe other OS, so we can use native UFS2 as data
>> partition among various OS.
>>
>
> I like this idea. In particular, I would like to have UFS2 SU+J
> available for use in certain Linux VMs and was thinking about this
> possibility earlier in the week. However, I no longer qualify to be a
> GSoC student and I do not have time to do it myself.
> [...]
> Speaking as a kernel filesystem hacker (with most of my experience in
> Linux), I think this could be too ambitious depending on how you add
> detail. In particular, Linux has a moving target of a VFS (which causes
> much pain) and Windows' IFS is very different from the SunOS VFS that
> has become the basis for implementing multiple filesystems on different
> UNIX implementations and copy-cats.
[...]

Something worth pointing out here: in NetBSD, and thanks to rump, you
can already get the *verbatim* in-kernel code of UFS2 built on a
variety of host platforms. You could very easily turn the existing
file system code into a FUSE file-system for Linux, for example, or
write the necessary shims to bundle the code into a kernel driver.

In other words and in my opinion: rewriting file system code from
scratch is outside of the scope of GSoC, but writing the glue code for
the above to happen doesn't sound too crazy. (The only problem may be
if NetBSD's UFS2 driver is not compatible with FreeBSD's... but I
believe they should be for the "basic stuff".)

Some links:

https://github.com/rumpkernel/buildrump.sh
http://wiki.netbsd.org/rumpkernel/