What about other filesystems?

Posted Jan 16, 2021 0:13 UTC (Sat) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: What about other filesystems? by joib
Parent article: Fast commits for ext4

You may be thinking of NetBSD, which replaced softupdates with journaling in FFS. Softupdates is still the only option on OpenBSD, but I'm more than contented on that front. AFAIU, FreeBSD also still supports softupdates, though the FreeBSD community seems to be migrating to ZFS.

What about other filesystems?

Posted Feb 1, 2021 14:25 UTC (Mon) by drjohnnyfever (guest, #144560) [Link]

The situation on FreeBSD is actually a bit complicated. The current default configuration uses journaled soft updates (su+j) which work like traditional soft updates with the exception that there is enough metadata journaled to avoid having to run a background fsck to reclaim space from orphaned allocations.

FreeBSD also supports proper journaling (logging) with gjournal which works at the block layer rather than in UFS itself. If I recall correctly, gjournal keeps a proper intent log of disk writes rather than just a metadata journal. It also allows you to use a separate device for the log.

ZFS does seem to be the way forward on FreeBSD but Netflix is pretty big consumer of UFS/FFS so they have been sponsoring continued development.