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Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) Now GPL
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jun 23, 2008 02:51 PM
from the yet-another-convert dept.
from the yet-another-convert dept.
melios writes "In a move that could help boost the scalability of Linux for grids and other advanced 64-bit multiprocessor applications, HP has released its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) source code to the open source community. Source code, design documentation, and test suites for AdvFS are available on SourceForge."
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Sheesh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Allow me to be the first to say: It's about fucking time.
Re:Sheesh... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but does netcraft confirm it?
Parent
Re:Sheesh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Declarations/health warnings: :-)
1) I work for Sun and I rather like ZFS
2) In a former life I also used AdvFS and thought
it was a good filesystem; probably the best general
purpose FS around until ZFS.
3) Integrating AdvFS into Linux and exercising it for prime
time won't be an overnight job; perhaps several years
before it can be deemed trustworthy.
Parent
What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there some reason to pick this file system over any of the other 100 file systems you can get for Linux?
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
because it's not a "killer" filesystem?
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
i dunno... no wifi, less space than ZFS. lame!
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
AdvFS is comparable in features to ZFS - it has snapshotting, intelligent striping and mirroring, dynamic resizing, etc.
In short, there's no comparable production filesystem in Linux right now. There's Btrfs from Oracle, but it's in deep alpha.
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nah dude, SGI's xfs (in vanilla Linux since ages now) can do all of those tricks, too.
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it can't. XFS has not the concept of "storage pool" that ZFS and AdvFS have. It doesn't have ZFS/AdvFS-style snapshots. XFS is also a journaling filesystem, unlike ZFS (AdvFS however is a journaled filesystem - and even then, the journaling modes of advfs allow to configure a much better data integrity than ZFS)
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Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
No. XFS is a multimedia-oriented filesystem, it was designed to support multithreaded streaming with guaranteed access times. It works well for these use-cases.
But it doesn't work well for a lot of other use-cases, though. Hence, the current development of Btrfs.
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
So is ZFS, genius...
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't have the Merkle tree and the associated error-detection properties of ZFS though.
Also, AdvFS (or PolyFS, as I could swear it was called in the beginning - though Google can't seem to any record of it) had a pretty bad reliability record in its earlier days, at least bad enough that its unreliability still was mentioned in DEC Open Systems Support when I visited there in 2000.. (by which stage Tru64 clearly was on life-support). ;)
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't have the Merkle tree and the associated error-detection properties of ZFS though.
Also, AdvFS (or PolyFS, as I could swear it was called in the beginning - though Google can't seem to any record of it) had a pretty bad reliability record in its earlier days, at least bad enough that its unreliability still was mentioned in DEC Open Systems Support when I visited there in 2000.. (by which stage Tru64 clearly was on life-support). ;)
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully this will make Sun re-consider licensing ZFS under the GPLv2.
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
it has snapshotting, intelligent striping and mirroring, dynamic resizing
Eh, exactly which feature is unique? Snapshotting, striping, mirroring, resizing, encryption, etc, all of it can be done through the device mapper stack.
I have situations where I don't want any filesystem at all on the mixed chunks (shared iSCSI block devices, for example), others where I want partial mirrors, parts crypted, parts remote-synced, etc. Mixing block device, volume management and filesystem together in my opinion, simply bad engineering. There are far too many assumptions about what people usually do so you end up with something suitable only for exactly what the designer had in mind, and worse, sometimes completely unsuitable for what people actually do.
Having run both AdvFS and ZFS, I _vastly_ prefer the layered approach of ext3/LVM/md/etc.
there's no comparable production filesystem
Yes, well, try actually running ZFS in production for a while with any kind of odd load (and some not so odd loads at all). Sometimes things just aren't all they're hyped up to be.
Filesystems are one part of most systems where 'exciting' isn't the most desirable feature.
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
Comparison Of File Systems [wikipedia.org]
Although its missing from some of the charts...
AdvFS [wikipedia.org]
And that page is rather limited in information.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
Is there some reason to pick this file system over any of the other 100 file systems you can get for Linux?
AdvFS is a clustered FS.
Parent
Cool (Score:5, Funny)
The last file system I messed around with was absolute murder.
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
STOP LAUGHING YOU HEARTLESS BASTARDS! (Score:5, Funny)
That's not funny! It's wrong! It's wrong to laugh at other people's misery! Stop laughing!
I mean, look at this:
"The last file system I messed around with was absolute murder."
That is clearly meant to poke fun at how EXT3 is gradually replacing EXT2. A lot of people worked very hard on EXT2, it's served the Linux community well for a long time, so I don't think it's right to make fun of it like this!!!
Parent
AdvFS (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I will wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Spiritual ancestor of ZFS (Score:5, Insightful)
I just had a quick glance through the wikipedia page on this filesystem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdvFS [wikipedia.org]
and it seems to share a surprising number of features with ZFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS [wikipedia.org]
For example, pools, snapshots etc.
Cool, license squabbling aside I look forward to the massively fragmented UNIX codebase slowly coalescing in this area.
As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:5, Interesting)
...all I can say is that this would have been amazing news about ten years ago. Even five years ago it would have been pretty great.
Now? Well, it sounds like HPaq is just kicking it to the curb so it will probably be another year or two before anyone can beat it into a working filesystem for anything but HPucks. There is already no shortage of file systems that can do what AdvFS could do, so by the time it is ready for prime time prime time will have moved on.
Oh well. 1998 me is still pleased to hear this.
Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux Weekly News [lwn.net] has a comment from an HP developer indicating they aren't putting this out there so it can become a linux file system, but so that the lessons learned and parts of the code that are useful can be incorporated into one of the linux file systems of the future. I took it to mean, take our code and use whatever you can to make ext4 or ext5.
Parent
Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:5, Funny)
That's all you'd tell your 1998 self?!?? I'd tell mine to invest heavily in the DotComs so he'd lose all his money...it'd be hilarious like that time someone told me they were my future self and that I should invest heavily in DotCom start-ups and I lost all my money!
Parent
Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:5, Informative)
This was the filesystem that HP tried to port to HPUX and failed. They licensed Veritas instead.
I figured that the multithreading that I'd always heard worked so well in AdvFS/Tru64 was hard to port to the non-multithreaded HPUX kernel.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39175690,00.htm [zdnet.co.uk]
"It had initially planned to complete the migration of the TruCluster/AdvFS feature from Tru64 Unix to HP-UX 11i v3 in the middle of 2006."
http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1214253121145+28353475&threadId=754760 [hp.com]
"No TruCluster or AdvFS for HP-UX after all"
Parent
Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:4, Informative)
This was the filesystem that HP tried to port to HPUX and failed. They licensed Veritas instead.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39175690,00.htm [zdnet.co.uk] "It had initially planned to complete the migration of the TruCluster/AdvFS feature from Tru64 Unix to HP-UX 11i v3 in the middle of 2006."
http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1214253121145+28353475&threadId=754760 [hp.com] "No TruCluster or AdvFS for HP-UX after all"
It probably would have made the release too, except that it got canned after it was working.
It wasn't that HP failed to port ADVfs and trucluster to HPUX -- it was that they decided to stop it in favor of the other solution for arguably political and financial reasons. The people at HP in California were more than happy for the DEC people in New Hampshire to go away, even at the cost of licensing something that was no better than what they already owned outright, but would need to fund support for.
One wonders why they have bothered with this release at this point.
-dB
Parent
Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:5, Informative)
Which would be why the subject references "Digital UNIX", which was the name used by DEC after they gave up on OSF/1. Tru64 was Compaq's name for it, because they really hated words that were spelled correctly.
Of course if you know enough to nit-pick that then you would also know about what happened to it after the HP-Compaq merger and how the last surviving Digital engineers tried to weld useful features like AdvFS and TruCluster onto HP-UX only to have their projects canceled in favour of inferior and more expensive Carly-approved products.
So I won't explain that, given the lineage of the code, it's probably the stuff that was ported to HP-UX.
Parent
Good News Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
I used ADVFS when I worked at DEC/Compaq. It is a really nice filesystem to use.
If the utilities are GPL's as well that is even better news.
Copying whole filesystems is a breeze as is copying filesystem trees and traversing over volume mount points ( ie not including mount points and all their files.)
It also gives you the ability to add/remove extra space to mounted volumes just like LVM does but IMHO without having to pre allocate it. /S
I would expect that some of the features may well be in EXT4 but I think that some of the Utilities could be made to use EXT4.
Re:Good News Indeed (Score:5, Informative)
To answer your question, yes the utilities are user GPL-license.
Parent
What's the obsession with filesystems? (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly the Linux community doesn't really need to burn energy supporting a half dozen filesystems.
Talk to six linux admins and you'll get at least that many "every filesystem but the one I'm using sucks!" responses.
I'd gladly stand up for a lack of choice on the filesystem front. Pick one, make sure it's absolutely tested, make sure it supports a nice range of features.
Integrating a filesystem into another OS is a decidedly non-trivial task unless you just want to read files.
Thanks, HP, but I don't really want your no-longer-commercially-viable undead zombieware.
Re:What's the obsession with filesystems? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone has been looking at ZFS to provide a whole lot of this same feature set, but the CDDL license has been a significant stumbling block. Releasing AdvFS as GPL could actually put it in the running for real world adoption and use on a large scale. I think Sun already considered this a battle won and may now have to rethink their strategy. If they released Sun as GPL in the next month, I'd be willing to bet AdvFS would probably be largely ignored and become a historical footnote. If Sun waits and lets it gain traction (as they tend to do) it could be they will find themselves with another cool technology they sat on too long and which has been replaced y the OSS community.
Tru64 goodness (Score:5, Interesting)
I currently use Tru64 in production at least.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you think HP bought again the newer Veritas File system and didn't use the already payed for version they picked up with Tru64?
It has some good things in it. Pick them out carefully and learn from them. Then think about what is needed to administer your File systems in real life, and implement it.
Re:A new open file system? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:A new open file system? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Your sarcasm detector needs adjustment.
Re:A new open file system? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ask Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
I am totally serious: why does the back of my left ear smell like cheese doodles? I don't store any kind of foodstuffs behind my ear, and I bathe regularly. Please help.
Parent
Re:Ask Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
At least they're not stealing underpants anymore. Must have been because I saved that gnome in halflife 2 episode 2. Ever since then, they seem to be treating me better.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When somebody asks a question that could be answered by a very simple Google, they're either being funny or they're so terminally lazy it's silly to respond too them. And when the question is about a guy whose murder trial has been in the news (especially the nerdcentric news) for months, I think it's safe to assume that the questioner is not being lazy.