61–65 of 65 posts
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ZFS was never any prettier on BSD either, so wouldn't blame Linux in that. But yes, bcachefs is somewhat interesting. Or maybe btrfs manages to clean up their act one day.
ZFS on FreeBSD was very pretty, till Linux guys added adb and other Linux-specific features.
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A CoW filesystem itself is not much more complicated than a plain filesystem. Or maybe a CoW softraid, with the filesystem existing at a different layer. ZFS has countless bonus tunables, several types of caching distinct from the kernel VFS cache, its own write logs and special devices, multiple levels of topology (datasets in a pool consisting of vdevs consisting of drives), deduplication, compression, etc. It is a…
You didn't answer the question. You can't claim that there are simpler solutions then not actually provide a simpler solution. Which handwaving is not. > A CoW filesystem itself is not much more complicated than a plain filesystem. And yet there isn't one out there, there's pretty much only ZFS and BTRFS, the latter having been in a state of almost-but-not-actually-working for over a decade now. bcachefs is the only…
And what was would be a reasonable response to you? Pasting a novel filesystem implementation as proof that the existing ones are overcomplicated? Opinions do not have a burden of evidence.
There is a handful of CoW filesystems out there, showing that it is certainly not an insurmountable issue to write one. Rather, the problem is stopping people from doing more at this point, keeping the design simple instead.
That we don't have something better yet is likely a result of writing filesystems in general being rather laborous to do right regardless of CoW, and being incredibly unrewarding - few care about filesystems unless it's broken.
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ZFS on FreeBSD was very pretty, till Linux guys added adb and other Linux-specific features.
In what way? Back when I used it it seemed just as misplaced. Its own mount semantics, its own caches, all that.
Miles better than all that geom_xxx RAIDs (I've been maintainer of geom_raid5, mind you), chipset RAIDs and FFS2 SU+J stuff, which is not completely stable even right now — I've got a ton of erros from forced foreground fsck after "normal" background fsck completion as soon as 2019 (I don't have single R/W FFS2 after that, and I'm happy!)
With all my due respect to McKusick, all this modernization of FFS2 (SU, snapshots, SU+J) always was very fragile, and software RAIDs implemented as GEOMs is much worse than ZFS VDEV layer.
Linux-induced changes downgrade ZFS performance a lot, though :-( Another level of indirection in ARC is really big deal.