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Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) Now GPL
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday June 23, @03:51PM
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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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?
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Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
because it's not a "killer" filesystem?
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Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
i dunno... no wifi, less space than ZFS. lame!
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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.
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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). ;)
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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.
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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.
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Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
So is ZFS, genius...
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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.
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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.
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Cool (Score:5, Funny)
The last file system I messed around with was absolute murder.
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AdvFS (Score:5, Informative)
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I think I will wait... (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:5, Funny)
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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!
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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"
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Re:A new open file system? (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Re:Good News Indeed (Score:5, Informative)
To answer your question, yes the utilities are user GPL-license.
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