ZFS - horse of a different colour

Posted Jun 21, 2007 0:33 UTC (Thu) by szaka (subscriber, #12740) [Link]

This is not about a race. In fact we are already working implicitely on Linux ZFS support "by" FUSE. One of the major driving forces behind NTFS-3G development is exactly that, to also help ZFS development.

Open source NTFS-3G with FUSE (Linux, FreeBSD), MacFUSE (OS X), ReFUSE (NetBSD) is for interoperability which is used by many, regularly. Most users don't care what's the technology, only if it works (reliably, usable, featureful enough). This includes performance, which would be typically the major theoretical complain if a user space driver were involved (as you also commented).

But the truth is, if it exists at all, far more complex.

The hybrid driver architecture involves overhead but it seems that there are many ways to minimize and offset this to a level where the dominant performance factor will be the design of the file system and the quality of the driver's implementation (used data structures, caches, algorithms, etc running on a specific, speedily changing hardware architecture).

I hope, that at some point NTFS-3G can help to dispel most of the performance related doubts and demonstrates that at least the block device based user space file system drivers can be a viable technical solution used with trust by millions. Only a couple of years work left then hopefully we will be a bit more clever :-)