i was wondering about the BeFS did it get some upgrades or is it still the same since BeOS R5? Would it be possible to add a native ZFS (Solaris File system)?
just curious… Cheers
AFAIK its the same implementation of the BFS with some very minute changes. For all intensive purposes I belive it is identical.
There’s some detail and a list of differences over here:
- http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem.ars
Adding ZFS to Haiku would be very cool, but someone would have to volunteer to do it. It would take some work.
Aside for speed, what improvements do you see needed for Haiku-FS? All the ideas I have seem to be more work than the developers are willing to spend time on. The things I would be interested in have limited uses to others like:
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Snapshots - Uses a lot of hard drive space.
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File level versions - Will need a change in the user interface.
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Combining (1) and (2) - Does not use so much hard drive space but still has user design questions.
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Partition positioning - better control of the start/end of partitions will help the performance of SSDs.
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Backup SuperBlock - In writing my file recovery program I was surprised to find there were no backups of the root directory data contained in the SuperBlock. (My superblock had been wiped)
May I ask why you would want ZFS for Haiku? I don’t see the need for it on a desktop OS, is there something about it that you really miss like snapshots?
Earl, most file system have a tiny flaw in my opinion… the most important thing about a file system to me is data protection. By data protection i mean protection against hardware failure which zfs offers by hashing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_Integrity) which is a holy feature… I use many HDD for work but i can’t have the luxury of mirroring my HDD my motherboard allows 6 HDD and i have 4 TB of data.
Hashing the data on a hard drive will only tell you if the data is corrupted or not. You really want support for RAID and/or ECC (error correcting code) to protect your data. However, on the lowest level of operation hard drives already use ECC so you really need a raid system.
Interestingly that is a feature I am looking at writing into my next ram-drive which I intend to have back itself up to a hard drive at regular intervals, I have already considered it to be a good idea for it to write it’s backup to more than one storage device. This is not true raid, but it would help protect the data if there was a power failure. And yes I would use hashing myself to see which copy is valid.
I just read the URL you supplied. Notice it too says that hashing in itself does not ensure the data is recoverable. However, I do agree that the data recovery feature of ZFS is nice to have, I think the checksum feature can be added to BeFS as there is plenty space in the internal structures to add them. Data recovery would be harder to add.
yeah, data recovery is the key feature that i would like to most, it’s also true that you mentioned about checksum doesn’t ensure data recovery. those two feature would be awesome to have in any fs. i use etx4 on my pc and i had all headers of one partition that went missing and data recovery is impossible. i probably have to make a data storage server with opensolaris or any opensolaris based distro.