HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

[Posted June 23, 2008 by corbet]

HP has released the Tru64 filesystem (under the name AdvFS) under the GPLv2 license; the code can be obtained from the AdvFS site. AdvFS claims a number of worthwhile features, including multi-device storage pools, online resizing, snapshotting, deleted file recovery, and more. Note that there does not appear to be a working Linux port at this point, but the code is available and that is a good start.

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Posted Jun 23, 2008 16:54 UTC (Mon) by bdale (subscriber, #6829) [Link]

While it would be fine with HP if someone wants to "port" AdvFS to Linux or any other
operating system with a GPLv2 compatible license, this contribution is not intended to
"compete" with other existing file system projects underway in and around the kernel.org
development community.  

Rather, our hope is that the algorithms, design documentation, and test suite now available at
the AdvFS site... and the active participation of HP engineers in various open-source file
system projects who have lots of AdvFS experience... will help to accelerate the inclusion of
AdvFS-like enterprise features and capabilities in next-generation file systems for Linux.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 24, 2008 8:41 UTC (Tue) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link]

In any case, thank much for opening it.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 18:00 UTC (Mon) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Why wasn't it ported to HP-UX?

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 18:27 UTC (Mon) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

It was:

This directory includes the source code for a second generation implementation of AdvFS, including the kernel modules, commands and utilities.

This is the code that was ported to HP-UX.

(From the notes on the sourceforge download page for the gen2 source)

It looks like it was ported but never productized, possibly[1] because HP realized that both HP-UX and Tru64 were dead ends: worth maintaining for the existing customer base, but not worth a lot of investment.

Steve

[1] meaning: complete wild-ass guess on my part.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 20:22 UTC (Mon) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Hm.  Given how the IBM changed the strategy wrt AIX in recent few years - they switched from
considering AIX to be a dead end to be replaced by Linux to considering Linux "AIX for the
less fortunate" - HP might want to reconsider.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 23:35 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

> Hm.  Given how the IBM changed the strategy wrt AIX in recent few years 
> - they switched from considering AIX to be a dead end to be replaced by
> Linux to considering Linux "AIX for the less fortunate" - HP might want
> to reconsider.

I don't know.. I do not see a large upswell in AIX purchases with that new formula. The number
of AIX systems is continuing to go down in relation to Solaris and Linux.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 25, 2008 21:34 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Does anyone know how hard would it be to get it running under HP-UX 11i?  Old HPPA machines
are fairly common and cheap, even here, in Poland; Alphas, on the other hand, are not.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 18:26 UTC (Mon) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]

I love the smell of abandonware in the morning.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 18:28 UTC (Mon) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

Sure, but better to make it available for scavenging/recycle than just throw it the trash.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 18:54 UTC (Mon) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Ah, the anti-corporate bias runs wild sometimes doesn't it?

Or perhaps you could simply view it as a research project which never went commercial.  If
this were code written by some poor grad student and actually was way less feature complete,
would this perhaps be more easily blessed as noble and a great contribution to free software
instead?  Bright ideas are many, solid implementations are few and marketable ones even fewer.
Instead of writing papers, HP "showed us the code" even if they never marketed it, is that
really so sad?  Are we that blessed with free code that we should sneer at them so easily?

Thank you HP for your contribution, I believe that many will value it.

Thank you HP

Posted Jun 23, 2008 19:08 UTC (Mon) by Felix_the_Mac (guest, #32242) [Link]


I have no clue whether this is 'abandonware' ... but even if it is I am very happy to have
them abandon it under the GPL.

Thank you HP!

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 19:13 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Or, viewed another way, "migration path".

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 20:12 UTC (Mon) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

I have never used Tru64 or AdvFS, but from the documentation it seems to be a very nice
filesystem. Hopefully it, or parts of it will be useful. Thanks HP!

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 23:12 UTC (Mon) by lieb (guest, #42749) [Link]

This is seriously cool news.  We used this extensively at AltaVista and it was the best back
then and I've not seen much that was as solid and full featured since.  They made the
important design decision that storage management and file management are separate management
problems but should be operationally integrated.  Linux does LVM for storage and ext[234] etc
for filesystems but they are too separated and a pain because the right hand doesn't know that
the left hand is even there.  Every time I've had to resize or shuffle storage about with
LVM+ext3; adding and removing physical volumes from logical volumes, I've missed it.

The design separates storage management from file management.  Filesets can be created,
resized (+ or -), cloned, and deleted all online without any need to hassle with the physical
layer.  Physical storage gets moved around, replaced, etc. without having to touch the
filesets at all.

Let the port begin.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 23, 2008 23:15 UTC (Mon) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

ZFS, anyone?

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 24, 2008 1:10 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Sun structured the license for ZFS quite carefully and in a very specific manner to prevent it
from ever being incorporated into Linux. I doubt the Linux folks will ever touch the source
code whose author has made it plainly known that they don't want it in the Linux kernel.

If you want to use ZFS in Linux you will have to use http://www.wizy.org/wiki/ZFS_on_FUSE 

Fuse file systems work quite well and I use them on a daily basis. Namely sshfs and smbnetfs.
Never touched ZFS though.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 24, 2008 2:05 UTC (Tue) by pjdc (subscriber, #6906) [Link]

Allow me to translate trasz's remark for you: "Gosh, this advfs sure sounds a like like zfs!".

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 24, 2008 18:46 UTC (Tue) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

Question: Which one was first created?

Anyway, it sounds like a cool filesystem - thanks HP for making it available!

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 24, 2008 19:53 UTC (Tue) by pjdc (subscriber, #6906) [Link]

advfs, by about a decade.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 25, 2008 21:31 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Actually, ZFS license is just a slightly more liberal Mozilla license.  It is GPL that
prohibits linking with anything that is not a subset of GPL.  That's why there are many
non-GPL-compatible licenses, but there are no non-CDDL-compliant, non-MPL-compliant or
non-BSD-compliant or whatever.  The full problem lies in GPL, not CDDL.

Of course, the "GPL" above is in fact "GPL as interpreted by RMS".

But I digress.

What I meant was, the usual way of doing stuff right now is a filesystem-on-top-of-lvm.  AdvFS
seems to have this two "layers" integrated together, just like ZFS.

And yes, AdvFS had it decade ago.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 24, 2008 4:37 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link]

ZFS still lacks the ability to remove devices from a pool, hence AdvFS still outranks it in my favourite filesystem list.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 24, 2008 4:39 UTC (Tue) by ksmathers (guest, #2353) [Link]

As I understand it AdvFS and ZFS have somewhat different design philosophies.  It's true that
both are intended for the enterprise market, but ZFS's philosophy seems to be that everything
works perfectly or you panic.  In our experience ZFS fails hard on a number of typical failure
cases, requiring not just an fsck, but a complete rebuild before the disk can be mounted
again.

Most other filesystems fail somewhat more gradually... some disk blocks are lost, maybe an
inode allocation is lost and a file gets overwritten, or something unidentifiable is dumped
into lost+found, but overall the filesystem remains usable.

HP open-sources the Tru64 filesystem

Posted Jun 24, 2008 5:51 UTC (Tue) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Indeed; while the intention of HP is for the code to inspire current and new Linux
filesystems, why not just port it whole? We get a modern ZFS-like filesystem -- if nothing
else, it'll be a more useful yardstick to compare LVM/extN and other volume management + file
system combinations.