Hi, I am very happy (and excited) to announce that DazukoFS 3.0.0-rc1 has been posted. I have spent the past month working on a complete rewrite of the file access logic as well as the userspace interface. Many of the ideas for the rewrite were inspired from the various discussions that took place on the malware-list.
I will be writing an article for the Dazuko website that will go into details about the changes (what they are and why they were made) and discuss some very interesting benchmarks that were taken. But until I find time for the article, I wanted to post a very brief set of answers about DazukoFS. 1. Is DazukoFS compatible with Dazuko? No. DazukoFS uses different devices and a new device protocol. The way that DazukoFS interacts with userspace applications is also different. (The userspace application receives a read-only, open file descriptor to the file being accessed, rather than a filename.) 2. Is it possible to run Dazuko and DazukoFS at the same time? Yes. Dazuko and DazukoFS are two totally different sets of code. There is not a single line of code that is shared between them. DazukoFS is a complete rewrite, focussing on security and performance, with no considerations for backwards compatibility. This means that both Dazuko and DazukoFS can run side by side without getting in each other's way. 3. What is the future of Dazuko? DazukoFS is the future and as of 3.0.0, it will be the official stable version. The website and documentation will be changed to focus exclusively on DazukoFS. As I have mentioned in the past, I have no intentions of maintaining Dazuko 2.x for the future. I may release a 2.4.0 version that runs only as a RedirFS filter. That's the only real future I see for the 2.x series. I have absolutely no interest in continuing to play LSM or syscall games. 4. What about DazukoFS in Linux mainline? After a 3.0.0 release, I will be devoting serious efforts to getting DazukoFS included in the kernel. In my opinion, the methods used by DazukoFS should be acceptable (and welcomed) by the Linux kernel community. 5. What about FreeBSD? DazukoFS is currently only available for Linux. It does not include a platform-independent layer, like Dazuko 2.x does. At some point I may work to provide DazukoFS for FreeBSD (and other systems). But right now my focus is Linux. 6. Is DazukoFS stable? I have done many tests on DazukoFS (with ext3) and am absolutely amazed at its stability. In my opinion, it is just as stable as the current Dazuko stable version. 7. Is DazukoFS complete? DazukoFS is based on the nullfs work I did. There are many filesystem calls that are not being hooked. This means that DazukoFS probably won't work on some filesystems. There is also no support for mmap() writes. These features will not be included in the 3.0.0 release. 8. Does DazukoFS have all the feature of Dazuko? No. DazukoFS does not include a trusted application framework. It also does not allow _any_ program to access files without triggering events, not even registered applications. (Since a registered application receives an open file descriptor, it can scan the file contents without needing to perform a file open.) I believe the trusted application framework was an important feature, so I am interested in implementing it for DazukoFS as well. But for now it is not included. DazukoFS does include one feature that Dazuko does not have. Groups can be removed when they are no longer needed. 9. Is DazukoFS really that much faster? YES! Here is simple summary of a file system test I performed (working purely in cache, no physical hard drive access). The details of the test and meaning of the results will be discussed in the article I will write. times (in seconds) --> user sys real no Dazuko/DazukoFS 9.740 1.900 11.648 DazukoFS (1 group) 7.440 4.120 16.118 DazukoFS (2 groups) 8.300 4.430 21.223 DazukoFS (3 groups) 7.640 5.500 26.423 Dazuko (1 group) 10.330 10.200 35.519 Dazuko (2 groups) 10.120 17.890 84.836 Dazuko (3 groups) 9.980 27.000 165.466 (A "group" is a registered group for Dazuko.) In summary, running DazukoFS with 3 groups is still considerably faster than running Dazuko with just 1 group. And as can be seen, DazukoFS scales nicely when adding more groups, whereas Dazuko is a disaster. I encourage Dazuko application developers to play around with the DazukoFS package. A test program is included. I think you will be impressed by the simplicity and speed of DazukoFS. There is a lot of documentation to be written still, so be patient. But feel free to post questions or problems. John Ogness -- Dazuko(FS) Maintainer _______________________________________________ Dazuko-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/dazuko-devel
