DragonFly users List (threaded) for 2007-02
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DragonFly users List (threaded) for 2007-02
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Re: Plans for 1.8+ (2.0?)


From: "Dmitri Nikulin" <dnikulin@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 19:20:33 +1100

On 2/1/07, ricardo <ricardo@igotbsd.org> wrote:
On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:35:42 -0500 (EST)
"Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@shiningsilence.com> wrote:

> On Wed, January 31, 2007 3:18 pm, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> >
>
> >     I am seriously considering our options with regards to ZFS or a
> >     ZFS-like filesystem.  We clearly need something to replace UFS,
> >     but I am a bit worried that porting ZFS would be as much work
> >     as simply designing a new filesystem from scratch.
>
> One of the reasons people are so excited about ZFS is because it
> solves the problem of managing space.  Disk management is and has
> always been a pain in the rear, and ZFS goes a long way toward
> reducing that.
>
> While constructing a new filesystem will help your goals, it will also
> mean that DragonFly users miss out on having all the other advantages
> that come with ZFS.  Put another way, we're going to lose planned
> functionality.

  You're implying that ZFS=God, in other words, you're implying that
there could be no better FS that ZFS. A very obnoxious statement!

That's not his point. He means that ZFS, while very good at what it is, would not be optimal for transparent clustering. And a file system which is designed for clustering won't necessarily be as good as ZFS on single machines. Either way, some use cases becomes sub-optimal, and it's a choice of what's more important to do first.

ZFS is optimized all the way down to avoiding byte swapping with a
simple but adequate "endian adaptiveness" technique, and being as new
as it is, it still has a few years worth of optimization potential.
It's definitely not going to perform as well on DragonFly as it does
on Solaris for a long time, but it could still be better than UFS by
design alone. Any optimization over that is just a bonus.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced there's a need to make a new
filesystem just for clustering, not just yet anyway. How about 9P?
It's not like clustering is a brand new problem, it's had decades of
research applied and there is no shortage of work to reference until
it's practical to attempt to do better.

---
Dmitri Nikulin

Centre for Synchrotron Science
Monash University
Victoria 3800, Australia



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