Linus merges XFS

[Posted September 16, 2002 by corbet]

Linus has just merged the XFS filesystem into his BitKeeper tree; it will thus show up in the 2.5.36 kernel. XFS is a high-performance, journaling filesystem from SGI; it now becomes the fourth journaling filesystem (alongside ext3, ReiserFS, and JFS) supported by the Linux kernel.

(Other stuff which has been merged, so far, for 2.5.36 includes an IEEE-1394 ("Firewire") update, the next big set of IDE patches, the "huge page" patch for i386 systems, and a number of other tweaks).

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Linus merges XFS

Posted Sep 17, 2002 1:05 UTC (Tue) by Schneelocke (guest, #3535) [Link] (1 responses)

This is good news indeed. Now if only he'd merge kdb as well...

Linus merges XFS

Posted Sep 17, 2002 14:17 UTC (Tue) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

> This is good news indeed. Now if only he'd merge kdb as well...

Linus has a well stated opinion of NOT liking debuggers. He
feels they encourage developers to work around a problem rather
than fixing the root cause. Not to mention that the appeal of
kdb is very very small (kernel developers only). I'd be extremely
surprised if kdb or any other debugger ever made it into the kernel.

Not "Fourth" --- Fifth!

Posted Sep 17, 2002 2:33 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] (2 responses)

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.

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?