Google Summer of Code 2010 is now over. It was a wonderful experience, and I learned a lot about Haiku’s internals, about file system development, and about myself. I successfully completed my proposal to a point an initial version of the Ext3 file system is available to the Haiku kernel for testing. There are some things that remain to be completed, like sparse files, proper revoke support, multi-transaction truncation and some more thorough testing, but overall, it was successful. The first thing that is very noticeable and that limits very much Ext3 support is proper Journal mode support. Because the file cache doesn’t support transactions (yet), it would require a hack to make the file data journalled and therefore the only mode supported is writeback, which unfortunately is also the less secure of three modes, because corrupt data can appear on the file system. I still want to finish this, but because it depends on an external part of the system, it will be a while until it gets completely finished.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/jvff/2010-09-21_google_summer_code_conclusion/