[haiku-development] Re: [gsoc2011] New File System

  • From: Ankur Sethi <get.me.ankur@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:49:37 +0530

Hi,

I spent some time digging into btrfs and zfs internals. Give a choice,
I'd probably prefer to run btrfs on a desktop system[1], but having it
as the default filesystem on Haiku is pretty much a no-go because of
the GPL.

So I've been wondering: what are the core developers' thoughts on
having zfs as the default filesystem in Haiku[2]?

Zfs would give us almost everything we need: snapshots and clones,
per-block checksums, extended attributes, encryption, great
performance and size limits we probably won't hit anytime soon.
Indexing can then be handled by the index_server in userland.

My concern is: would it be preferable to have a home-grown FS instead
of porting an existing one?

The porting effort would involve porting zfs to Haiku, getting Haiku
to boot off a zfs partition, adding support for initializing zfs
partitions to DriveSetup and a graphical administration tool. I have
not spent enough time with the zfs codebase to be able to say how much
is doable in one summer; right now I'm just looking for feedback on
the idea.

[1] I find btrfs simpler.
[2] In R2, of course.

-- 
Ankur Sethi
http://uncool.in
(GeneralMaximus on IRC and elsewhere)

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