Re: what is our answer to ZFS?

[Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org>]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 12:04:39AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 01:53:51PM +0100, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> > On 2005-11-21T11:19:59, J?rn Engel <joern@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> wrote:
> > 
> > > o Merge of LVM and filesystem layer
> > >   Not done.  This has some advantages, but also more complexity than
> > >   seperate LVM and filesystem layers.  Might be considers "not worth
> > >   it" for some years.
> > 
> > This is one of the cooler ideas IMHO. In effect, LVM is just a special
> > case filesystem - huge blocksizes, few files, mostly no directories,
> > exports block instead of character/streams "files".
> 
> This isn't actually a new idea, BTW.  Digital's advfs had storage
> pools and the ability to have a single advfs filesystem spam multiple
> filesystems, and to have multiple adv filesystems using storage pool,
> something like ten years ago.  Something to keep in mind for those
> people looking for prior art for any potential Sun patents covering
> ZFS.... (not that I am giving legal advice, of course!)
> 
> 						- Ted

Having played a few months with a machine installed with advfs, I
can say that I *loved* this FS. It could be hot-resized, mounted
into several places at once (a bit like we can do now with --bind),
and best of all, it was by far the fastest FS I had ever seen. I
think that the 512 MB cache for the metadata helped a lot ;-)

Regards,
Willy