Shows how ahead of its time SGI really was

Posted Feb 20, 2025 21:16 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
Parent article: Filesystem support for block sizes larger than the page size

We tend to look back to the era of "proprietary" UNIX as a lesser time but the sentence "XFS will finally support all the features that it supported in IRIX before it was ported to Linux in 2001" really hits home. Not only do we have XFS itself only because it was gifted by SGI but the kernel is only now able to offer all the features that XFS could rely on in IRIX almost 30 years ago.

My point is not that IRIX is better than Linux. Only that, if you consider what your home PC would have looked like in 2000, it is kind of mind blowing how advanced the software already was back then. Which makes sense of course because, though it would not hold a candle to today, the proprietary UNIX systems were designed for money-no-object hardware that pushed the technology of the time as far as it could go.

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Shows how ahead of its time SGI really was

Posted Feb 21, 2025 1:20 UTC (Fri) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (1 responses)

"but the kernel is only now able to offer all the features that XFS could rely on in IRIX almost 30 years ago."

reflinks?

XFS nowadays has holes in the knees of its jeans, which it mock derides as "ironic". For me XFS is a safe haven for data, especially for large files.

Veeam has supported reflinks for some time now and it is a bit of a game changer when you are dealing with backups that have a full and incrementals. A "synthetic full" can be generated within seconds by shuffling reflinks instead of blocks. Add a flag to cp and you can create a sort of clone within seconds - a bit like a volume snapshot but for individual files.

The real beauty of Linux and other promiscuous Unixes is that we have a lot of choice and sometimes we as sysadmins pick the right one for the job in hand.

Windows has vFAT, NTFS and ReFS and that's your lot. To be fair ReFS is shaping up nicely these days (it doesn't kick your puppies quite so often) and NTFS is very, very stable - regardless of how much you abuse it. vFAT is FAT - keep it simples.

Apples have files and I'm sure they are lovely.

Shows how ahead of its time SGI really was

Posted Feb 21, 2025 4:38 UTC (Fri) by bmenrigh (guest, #63018) [Link]

XFS has reflinks. I’ve been de-duping files on it for a while.