Techno Musings

As I reported in the previous post there are some interesting things going on when we look at btrfs and xfs.  The first thing that I want to say is that even with the rapid changes of sgi, Rackable, sgi of late the XFS file system is still going strong.  In fact they have been providing regular updates on xfs.org since Summer of 2008.  IMHO this is great as it shows there is a continued venerable alternative to ext3 and ext4 — the reality is that ReiserFS and JFS are largely dead and btrfs is on the rise, but still not stable.

Anyway, what I hypothesized in my last post was that the reason for the relative visual closeness of btrfs and xfs comes from more and more code being offloaded to the Linux kernel.  Well the most recent update on the xfs.org web site seems to suggest that is the case below is the relevant bit.

On June 9th we finally saw the release of Linux 2.6.30. For XFS this release mostly contains the improved ENOSPC handling, but also various smaller bugfixes and lots of cleanups. The code size of XFS decreased again by 500 lines of code in this release.

The Linux 2.6.31 merge opened in the mid of the month and some big XFS changes have been pushed: A removal of the quotaops infrastructure which simplifies the quota implementation, the switch from XFS’s own Posix ACL implementation to the generic one shared by various other filesystems which also supports in-memory caching of ACLs and another incremental refactoring of the sync code. …
Source: http://www.xfs.org/index.php/XFS_Status_Updates

While I still don’t have enough data to prove my hypothesis 100% I do feel that this is a step in the right direction of proving it to be the case.  If my hypothesis is indeed true then over time it will become easier and easier to create novel file systems for Linux.

Shout out to any Linux file system or kernel developers do you feel that it is easier to create a file system on Linux than other platforms?