Weekly Edition
Return to the Kernel page
| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Levanta's MapFS released
Once upon a time, kernel developers would post their contributions on the linux-kernel mailing list. Now they issue press releases instead. Along those lines, Levanta (the company once known as Linuxcare) has announced
the availability of MapFS. This GPL-licensed module allows a read-only filesystem to be mounted locally for write access, with any changes being kept on the local system. It looks like another implementation of the "translucent filesystem" idea.
(Log in to post comments)
Levanta's MapFS released Posted Oct 31, 2005 19:14 UTC (Mon) by busterb (subscriber, #560) [Link] This reminds me of ClusterNFS, but without the need to manually duplicate unique files per-host.
Levanta's MapFS released Posted Oct 31, 2005 19:17 UTC (Mon) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link] In what does that differ from unionfs? Am I missing something?
Levanta's MapFS released Posted Oct 31, 2005 23:23 UTC (Mon) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link] It's just one more implementation thrown in to the group of existingapproaches. Some of the previous few were: cowlinks: http://lwn.net/Articles/77972/ cowloop: http://www.atconsultancy.nl/cowloop/ dm snapshots: http://lwn.net/Articles/87714/ minifo: http://lwn.net/Articles/135283/ MuLaFS: http://www.ks.uni-freiburg.de/download/studienarbeit/WS04... olvfs: http://ovlfs.sourceforge.net/ translucency: http://sourceforge.net/projects/translucency/ unionfs: http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html vfs based union mount: http://www.free-it.de/archiv/talks_2005/paper-11254/paper... All these have in common that they are far from ready for being included in the mainline kernel, though the last two are somewhat promising: unionfs is widely used and union mounts are the right solution.
Levanta's MapFS released Posted Oct 31, 2005 23:26 UTC (Mon) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link] sorry, dm snapshots are already in the kernel of course, they just solve aslightly different problem.
Levanta's MapFS released Posted Nov 3, 2005 18:40 UTC (Thu) by joern (subscriber, #22392) [Link] Actually, cowlinks solve a different problem - keeping many copies of identical files on the same filesystem in an efficient way.
dm snapshots are also somewhat special, as they work on the block device level, not the filesystem level. This has a couple of advantages, mainly keeping the implementation simple. Biggest disadvantage is that the internal structure of a filesystem is ignored, so management of data within a snapshot is basically impossible.
All remaining ones are different implementations of the same basic idea.
Levanta's MapFS released Posted Nov 4, 2005 18:45 UTC (Fri) by gdamjan (subscriber, #33634) [Link] Maybe it will be more reliable than UnionFS, since it seems it's been in use for some time now.I think Slax (http://slax.linux-live.org) and Knoppix are the biggest users of UnionFS but they find that it's also their weakest part.
|
|
||||||||||||