Just before steam shot out of my ears, I was thinking that this all sounded
really cool.  I really like the new concept for PFS functionality.

Tim


On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 10:44 AM, Matthew Dillon <
[email protected]> wrote:

>    I'm almost done with the design stage for the HAMMER2 filesystem and
>    will soon begin coding.  The basic design document is here:
>
>        http://apollo.backplane.com/DFlyMisc/hammer2.txt
>
>        Lots of tech-speak inside, attach heat sinks to your brain!
>
>    I am going to caution that I expect it to take about a year to implement
>    most of the features (including the clustering bits which will be fully
>    integrated into the filesystem), and probably 2 years for it to reach
>    production stability.  HAMMER2 is not going to replace HAMMER1 any time
>    soon.
>
>    In addition, HAMMER2 is going to have two serious restrictions relative
>    to other filesystems.  (1) HAMMER2 will not support hardlinks.   And
>    (2) HAMMER2 has no physical way to resolve '..' and will depend on the
>    operating system's namecache to handle '..' (which DragonFly's will).
>
>    There are many reasons for these restrictions, but it mostly comes down
>    to the complexity of cluster cache coherency and mirroring protocols
>    (making hardlinks extremely difficult to implement) and support for
>    writable snapshots (making inode_num->physical translations and parent
>    pointers extremely difficult to implement).  It's kind of a
>    one-or-the-other problem.
>
>    HAMMER2 will also do away with the PFS concept, and instead any
>    subdirectory tree can be treated as a PFS and independently mirrored,
>    and also account for space & inodes used.
>
>    So HAMMER2 is going to have a lot of cluster-friendly features.  A
>    veritable ton, but in order to be able to implement those features
>    in a reasonable time frame with a reasonably low degree of complexity
>    I had to make the above two tradeoffs.
>
>                                        -Matt
>                                         Matthew Dillon
>                                        <[email protected]>
>

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