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Not "Fourth" --- Fifth!

Not "Fourth" --- Fifth!

Posted Sep 17, 2002 2:33 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256)
Parent article: Linus merges XFS

XFS will become the fifth journaling filesystem in the mainstream kernel. It seems that the JFFS/JFFS2 filesystems (by Axis Communications --- Swedish maker of network cameras) was merged into 2.4 back in Y2K. I don't know of a reliable way to definitively say when JFFS was first merged (other than exhaustively perusing LXR one revision at a time). However, I realize that this is a nitpick. JFFS seems to be very narrowly focused on flash devices --- I've never heard of it being used for any normal block device. There's a nice article on flash and MTD devices at LinuxDevices.


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Not "Fourth" --- Fifth!

Posted Sep 17, 2002 14:14 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Good point - JFFS has been in for some time. The original JFFS came from Axis, but it's been in Red Hat's hands for some time now. So XFS is the fourth journaling filesystem for normal uses; the requirements of flash devices make JFFS relatively unappealing (i.e. slow) for anything else.

Not "Fourth" --- Fifth!

Posted Sep 17, 2002 16:14 UTC (Tue) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

XFS will become the fifth journaling filesystem in the mainstream kernel.

Heh, actually the sixth if one counts NTFS. Of course, the Linux NTFS implementation doesn't journal anything, but the reference implementation (or can you call it that when it's legally perilous to actually refer to it, from a free software POV?) does.

Yes, I know I just confused "filesystem on-disk layout spec" with "filesystem implementation", but people seem to do that a lot when talking about filesystems....

Speaking of nothing, what's up with the jbd? (The journal block device is an abstraction layer invented by the ext3 folks, intended to be used by all journalling fs's, but still isn't.) Does anyone outside ext3 ever plan to use it?

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