[ale] Ext4 adoption anyone?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:45:14 -0500
Pat Regan <thehead at patshead.com> wrote:

> Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> > I see nothing on JFS; that could mean that there is nobody using
> > that filesystem or that it is virtually bug-free.  Don't know
> > which.  I also see nothing for vfat, and 7 messages in 4 threads
> > for btrfs, though that is probably because only a few people are
> > attempting to use btrfs at this point.
> 
> Aren't most of the problems with XFS and JFS related to the Linux
> kernel and not the filesystem itself?  What I mean is, I understand
> they are both rock solid in their native environments.

They might well be... the ports of them to Linux may be less than
perfect.  Why is not an issue for me so much as the fact that it is
problematic at least under Linux.

That's actually one reason I'd like to see more filesystem development
under FUSE.  If you're writing filesystems to a consistent API, and you
have a functional implementation of a filesystem which runs on any
conformant FUSE implementation (and you don't depend on any
operating system-specific behavior, function calls, etc.), you have
something very amazing: a filesystem that is truly portable between
operating systems.

Thinking of FUSE kind of reminds me of a project that existed to
attempt to standardize device driver APIs across different operating
systems.  The argument was that having a uniform API that everyone
could implement for device driver programmers would make it possible
for hardware vendors to write a device driver once, and then simply
build it for multiple operating systems.  I seem to recall that the FSF
was against that idea because of the implication that it would mean
that everyone would become complacent with running binary-only drivers.

(For the record, I don't mind binary-only drivers from a hardware
manufacturer, assuming that (a) the driver works and is guaranteed to
work, and (b) it has well-written documentation that says how to use
it.  That said, I don't know of many binary-only drivers that are
actually of any satisfying level of quality; even NVIDIA drivers kinda
stink depending on the chipset you're using.)

> > As far as FUSE filesystems go, I haven't used many.  But I do know
> > that of the ones I have used (sshfs, WikipediaFS, NTFS-3G, and
> > Captive NTFS) I have never had any problems with the FUSE driver
> > itself.  In the case of sshfs, the only problem that I have ever had
> > was with the remote host dropping the connection after a timeout,
> > which is easily fixed by keeping the filesystem active or by just
> > remounting the filesystem.
> 
> Make sure you have a "-o reconnect" on your sshfs command line.  My
> afuse passes that in.  If your connection drops, it'll try to bring it
> back up.

Hrm.  I will certainly try that out and see how it does.  I had fallen
back to using scp/sftp/rsync (depending on what I am doing) since
they're "easy enough" to use.  But having a real mount point is always
better, when it works all the time.  :)

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
http://www.trausch.us/
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