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Sat, 13 Jan 2007

Filesystem quest.


I've asked my known Unix admins (mostly Solaris and Linux, bits of AIX and *BSD and a lot of Windows knowledge) what FS features are the most required and requested ones. Here is short list in order of priority:

• clearness of the idea. I.e. no reiserfs-in-reiserfs problem or things like Solaris UFS on highly fragmented disk.
• reliability in expluatation. Different modes of journalling. Very fast recovery and fsck checks, for example ext3 and reiserfs with theirs 4 minutes per 250 MB when there are _no_ errors is completely unnacceptible when storage contains 20 and more partitions.
• ACL support and quotas.
• Defragmentation. At least tool to determine how high is fragmentation of the current partition and possible defragmentation. Currently it can be fixed through round data moving over empty partition.
  (Although I personally consider defragmentatino as a hack, tool for showing its status could be interesting. Main solution for that problem I see in delayed allocation and defragmenting through delayed allocation when file is read into VFS cache).
• Speed. Although this item is on different places between admins, it is very significant issue to have high read speed compared to hardware disk speed at least in most required setups (web/file/mail server) - current hardware easily allows to have more than 50 MB/sec speeds, while FS rarely get over 25 MB/sec limit.
• Snapshots. For backup purposes read-only snapshots are the killer feature. It is also interesting feature to have read-write snapshots (when main partition is mounted first time it would be useful to allow to mount it read-write from some point in past).
• Additional data processing units like compression, cryptography and so on, especially with interface to plug external modules.

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