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The Evolution of Stupidity: File Systems

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Re: The Evolution of Stupidity: File Systems

#21

Post by srdev »

mmatants wrote: post #20
perlgeek wrote: post #7

The article talks about repeating mistakes, and descends into the world of file systems, but I didn't quite understand what the problem is that is repeated there. Anybody care to explain? (FWIW my impression is that there's lots of reinventing going on in the open source FS development; everybody wants to reinvent the cool features from ZFS, but with improved performance or a slightly different architecture, and they…

I, for one, thought that he was going to argue against the overall hierarchical FS metaphor. Personally, I wonder what things would be like if the OS provided a key-value store (or some such NoSQL-ish API) as a core service instead.

I suspect that you would still have some semblance of built over such a file-system. Hierarchy is useful for organizing data, and I often find myself using keys that allow me to abstract hierarchy in my NoSQL systems. ex: "/foo/bar/0113" -> data

Re: The Evolution of Stupidity: File Systems

#22

Post by noahdesu »

I think this article is (doing a bad job of) attempting to explain that limitations behind the current byte-stream oriented interfaces and hierarchical organizations that have been around for 20 years. These two limitations show their heads when 1) people want extreme speed (parallel I/O), and 2) file systems begin to contain billions of files. People are storing more and more structured data, and building enormous middleware layers on top of the read/write to only present richer interfaces to higher levels.

Re: The Evolution of Stupidity: File Systems

#23

Post by naner »

rbanffy wrote: post #11
perlgeek wrote: post #7

The article talks about repeating mistakes, and descends into the world of file systems, but I didn't quite understand what the problem is that is repeated there. Anybody care to explain? (FWIW my impression is that there's lots of reinventing going on in the open source FS development; everybody wants to reinvent the cool features from ZFS, but with improved performance or a slightly different architecture, and they…

> everybody wants to reinvent the cool features from ZFS, Perhaps because ZFS cannot be integrated into Linux due to licensing issues. If Oracle would be generous enough to offer it under a compatible license, I have little doubt it would be very welcome, despite some of its architectural incompatibilities.

If Oracle would be generous enough to offer it under a compatible license, I have little doubt it would be very welcome, despite some of its architectural incompatibilities.

Oracle is developing Btrfs for Linux, I'm not sure they have any desire to make ZFS more attractive to Linux users.

Also, didn't Apple roll out ZFS on OSX and then abandon it? Does anyone know the reasoning behind that? Perhaps ZFS was over-hyped or is only useful in certain scenarios.

Re: The Evolution of Stupidity: File Systems

#24

Post by Florin_Andrei »

0x12 wrote: post #3

I'm fine with some of the criticisms but using XFS as the posterchild example of a free file system done 'right' is a bit much. XFS has absolutely terrible performance for lots of use cases (deletions, for instance). What the author also fails to understand - apparently - is that the problems plaguing the storage industry are perennial, they will never be resolved. We will always yearn for more storage that is more r…

> XFS has absolutely terrible performance for lots of use cases (deletions, for instance).

And has outstanding performance for lots of other use cases (handling large files, for instance).

Just like any other FS out there.

Re: The Evolution of Stupidity: File Systems

#25

Post by evilduck »

naner wrote: post #23
rbanffy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everybody wants to reinvent the cool features from ZFS, Perhaps because ZFS cannot be integrated into Linux due to licensing issues. If Oracle would be generous enough to offer it under a compatible license, I have little doubt it would be very welcome, despite some of its architectural incompatibilities.

If Oracle would be generous enough to offer it under a compatible license, I have little doubt it would be very welcome, despite some of its architectural incompatibilities. Oracle is developing Btrfs for Linux, I'm not sure they have any desire to make ZFS more attractive to Linux users. Also, didn't Apple roll out ZFS on OSX and then abandon it? Does anyone know the reasoning behind that? Perhaps ZFS was over-hyped…

Apple released a ZFS read-only driver. They've never offered support for it as a writable format as far as I'm aware.

Re: The Evolution of Stupidity: File Systems

#26

Post by rbanffy »

naner wrote: post #23
rbanffy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everybody wants to reinvent the cool features from ZFS, Perhaps because ZFS cannot be integrated into Linux due to licensing issues. If Oracle would be generous enough to offer it under a compatible license, I have little doubt it would be very welcome, despite some of its architectural incompatibilities.

If Oracle would be generous enough to offer it under a compatible license, I have little doubt it would be very welcome, despite some of its architectural incompatibilities. Oracle is developing Btrfs for Linux, I'm not sure they have any desire to make ZFS more attractive to Linux users. Also, didn't Apple roll out ZFS on OSX and then abandon it? Does anyone know the reasoning behind that? Perhaps ZFS was over-hyped…

> Does anyone know the reasoning behind that?

ZFS truly shines on hardware Apple no longer makes. It's home is on machines attached to several disks and SSDs. Apple's current server offering is a Mac Mini with two hard disks inside it.

It's too bad. Time Machine looks like it was made for ZFS snapshots.

Re: The Evolution of Stupidity: File Systems

#27

Post by ori_b »

mmatants wrote: post #20
perlgeek wrote: post #7

The article talks about repeating mistakes, and descends into the world of file systems, but I didn't quite understand what the problem is that is repeated there. Anybody care to explain? (FWIW my impression is that there's lots of reinventing going on in the open source FS development; everybody wants to reinvent the cool features from ZFS, but with improved performance or a slightly different architecture, and they…

I, for one, thought that he was going to argue against the overall hierarchical FS metaphor. Personally, I wonder what things would be like if the OS provided a key-value store (or some such NoSQL-ish API) as a core service instead.

is a hierarchy all that different from a key value store?
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