Whither XFS? (was: Congrats Marcelo)

[Daniel Phillips <phillips@bonn-fries.net>]

On February 26, 2002 11:59 pm, Steve Lord wrote:
> Yes jfs went in cleanly, because they reimplemented their filesystem
> from the ground up, and had a large budget to do it. XFS does not fit
> so cleanly because we brought along some features other filesystems did
> not have:
> 
>   o Posix ACL support

Are you able to leverage the new EA interface?  (Which I still don't like
because of the namespace syntax embedded in the attribute names, btw,
please don't misinterpret silence as happiness.)

>   o The ability to do online filesystem dumps which are coherent with
>     the system call interface

It would be nice if some other filesystems could share that mechanism, do
you think it's feasible?  If not, what's the stumbling block?  I haven't
looked at this for some time and there's was some furious work going on
exactly there just before 2.5.  It seems we've at least progressed a
little from the viewpoint that nobody would want that.

>   o delayed allocation of file data

Andrew Morton is working on generic delayed allocation at the vfs level I
believe, why not bang heads with him and see if it can be made to work with
VFS?

>   o DMAPI

It would be nice to have unsucky file events.  But there's been roughly zero
discussion of dmapi on lkml as far as I can see.

> As it is we did all of these, and we seem to have half the Linux NAS
> vendors in the world building xfs into their boxes.

True enough.

-- 
Daniel