Re: Why not FUSE ZFS?
[no offence, not directed particularly at you, just taking this mail to hang the rant] Dmitri Nikulin wrote: Now it just occurred to me we can have ZFS for the nominal price of supporting FUSE. It's not as fast as a pure kernel version, of course, but Matt says he wants userland file systems anyway and FUSE is a de-facto standard for that. Even NetBSD's puffs now has a 'refuse' compatibility kit. FreeBSD also has FUSE support. DragonFly can support FUSE by wrapping SYSLINK as is already planned, and this immediately gives it a lot of file systems currently beyond reach. So the choice is: 1. port FUSE as a new filesystem 2. port ZFS as a new filesystem notice that only the name differs? It is both work, so why not go for the real thing? FUSE does not have a particularly optimized interface, so performance won't be sexy. Doh, people, don't you realize no matter what you talk about ZFS or whatnot, IT WILL NOT HAPPEN! Unless, of course, you start working on it YOURSELF. Nobody wants to actively port ZFS. Seriously, there is nobody. Matt is working on the cluster filesystem. So, hmm.. who else could work on it... me? I'm doing threading for now and frankly, I don't need ZFS (yet). Thomas? Victor? Yonetani? Sascha? They all mind their own business, for a reason: they don't care about ZFS (at least for the time being), which is perfectly okay. That leaves us (about) with: YOU (plural). Again: All this talk is moot. This is not even a bikeshed (where people want to do something and get their legs kicked). This is (mostly) superficial (mostly) non-technical small talk about something that hopefully somebody else will do. People, get over it. DO something, or not. But don't scratch your head if you chose the latter and nothing happens. cheers simon -- Serve - BSD +++ RENT this banner advert +++ASCII Ribbon /\ Work - Mac +++ space for low €€€ NOW!1 +++ Campaign \ / Party Enjoy Relax | http://dragonflybsd.org Against HTML \ Dude 2c 2 the max ! http://golden-apple.biz Mail + News / \ signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Why not FUSE ZFS?
On 2/20/07, Simon 'corecode' Schubert [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So the choice is: 1. port FUSE as a new filesystem 2. port ZFS as a new filesystem notice that only the name differs? It is both work, so why not go for the real thing? FUSE does not have a particularly optimized interface, so performance won't be sexy. Am I wrong that FUSE is both easier to (sup)port and going to bring a lot more interoperability with other systems? This feels like Linux emulation to me - it's not beautiful and it's not a real solution, but its utility in the field is high enough to make or break an OS' adoption. The code to support Linux emulation is greater than many individual programs you'll run on it, but it scales because afterwards you can run many such interesting programs, even ones you can't possibly port because they're black boxes. In fact, given there are going to be proprietary file systems out there that use FUSE, and those will likely be Linux binaries, having a high compatibility there will mean DragonFly can run Linux FUSE binaries. I don't know if FreeBSD can do that yet, or if anybody has even tried it, but it's certainly practical. That leaves us (about) with: YOU (plural). Great, so somebody can undertake the much lesser effort to support FUSE, and ZFS comes for free. FUSE is coming sooner or later, one way or another, because its utility is too high to ignore. In fact a short-term approach might be to port puffs from NetBSD, and then refuse can work on top of that. Later if SYSLINK is found to be a better approach, puffs and FUSE can be replaced with wrappers for SYSLINK. If it was me doing the work (and someday it might be, I'm interested too) I'd rather take the sub-optimal approach that favors functionality and interoperability. It's nice that it also seems to take less effort. Just out of curiosity I'll investigate the work necessary to support puffs within DragonFly's VFS sometime soon. --- Dmitri Nikulin Centre for Synchrotron Science Monash University Victoria 3800, Australia
Why not FUSE ZFS?
I got to thinking, there is a lot of debate raging over whether ZFS or DFS (my tentative nickname for the alternative) is a better priority for development. I was previously on the ZFS camp, thinking a good on-disk file system which is gaining a lot of hype and adoption would be a very good bargaining chip in DragonFly's pile. Now it just occurred to me we can have ZFS for the nominal price of supporting FUSE. It's not as fast as a pure kernel version, of course, but Matt says he wants userland file systems anyway and FUSE is a de-facto standard for that. Even NetBSD's puffs now has a 'refuse' compatibility kit. FreeBSD also has FUSE support. DragonFly can support FUSE by wrapping SYSLINK as is already planned, and this immediately gives it a lot of file systems currently beyond reach. FreeBSD has kernel support well on the way, and it seems to be ahead of the FUSE version. I don't know how useful this is to DragonFly (as far as being less work to port than the Solaris code, or being portable to userland). Not sure about the license issues of the FUSE ZFS, but purely pragmatically, it may be the 'right' thing to develop rather than try to port a kernel implementation into the DragonFly kernel. Like Matt said, even if DragonFly doesn't survive, a lot of its technology will, and developing things in the userland is precisely the way to ensure that's what happens. It seems almost obvious that this is how ZFS should be approached too, and it's already well on the way. --- Dmitri Nikulin Centre for Synchrotron Science Monash University Victoria 3800, Australia
