The lack of a journalling file system for FreeBSD has been discussed over and over on the mailing lists. I have read and understood all the advocacy for softupdates and background fsck. Softupdates gives great performance benefits. Background fsck is useful, but with seriously degraded performance until it completes.
I had to build a storage system this week with a capacity of 1.6TB.
Regrettfully I decided to use Linux with XFS as the thought of waiting for fsck to complete in the event of a problem makes me wince. I experimented with FreeBSD, using two 800GB partitions and things like that, but in the end it comes back to the fsck if for any reason the machine goes down uncleanly.
I am a big advocate of FreeBSD. I have great reliability on our 60+ FreeBSD machines. I'm ignoring all suggestions for UPSs and the like. I know all about that. That's not the point. The crux is FreeBSD needs a journalling file system, preferably IMHO based on UFS which we are all used to. Solaris has logging. It works fine for everything we use it for. It's a mount option, for those who don't know about it. In other words I can turn it on off. If I've had to turn away from FreeBSD for this requirement, I can imagine many other people will have too.
There's talk of XFS and Reiserfs ports and this and that, the legal issues of GPL code, blah blah blah. I see that Wasabi provide (sell) a journalling file system that "builds on the established and trusted Berkeley Unix Filesystem" [1]. I have no idea of the cost. The point is, it can be done.
Let's look at the reality of getting a journalling file system into FreeBSD. What would it cost to commission someone who knows enough about file systems (preferably UFS IMHO) to write the code? Would anyone be prepared to contribute to a fund to get this done? How long would it take? Is anyone remotely interested in this? I would propose that those who put up the money get to decide how the journalling would be implemented. No ticket, no laundry
Is anyone remotely interested in this?
Cheers, John.
1. http://www.wasabisystems.com/products/journaling_filesystem.htm _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
