Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) Now GPL 226
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."
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?
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.
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)
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
because it's not a "killer" filesystem?
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
i dunno... no wifi, less space than ZFS. lame!
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.
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.
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)
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.
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)
So is ZFS, genius...
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). ;)
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Funny)
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). ;)
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully this will make Sun re-consider licensing ZFS under the GPLv2.
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Doubtful. GPLv3 is too nice a license for them to reject just because Linus is being bullheaded.
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Well, I guess that's what one gets for distrusting the FSF.
Linus is apparently vulnerable to close friends whispering things in his ear. Take Larry McVoy for instance: far as I know, mr. Torvalds supported BitKeeper until McVoy terminated the free license; that is to say, Linus was perfectly fine with all the competition-restricting license details and the use of proprietary software to manage a Free Software project. And if you remember, back in 0.x and 1.x days, things like sound card drivers for Linux us
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And seriously--BitKeeper worked for Linus's needs. He's a pragmatist, not an idealist.
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The poster you are replying to:
You:
It apparently escaped you that these are pretty much one and the same thing.
An idealist, for example, is a politician who would try to stick to his beliefs even when sniper's bullets are whizzing next to his head. A "pragmatist" is a politician who will take all the lobbyist money he can get his paws on (after all this is the "reality" of politics, surely?), promise
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.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hear hear! I think snapshots, mirrors, stripes, encryption, compression and resizing are all very useful things. But I'd like my file system to stick to managing files and use the volume and block layers to provide those features under any file system.
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Thank you! Finally someone wrote "Hear hear!" instead of "Here here!".
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Thear, thear. Don't get all in a knot over spelling.
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I think snapshots, mirrors, stripes, encryption, compression and resizing are all very useful things.
Got it.
But I'd like my file system to stick to managing files and use the volume and block layers to provide those features under any file system.
How, exactly, should the block layer provide resizing or compression?
I mean, yes, you can do snapshots -- clumsily, as you have to set aside space for it (can't just stuff it into free space on that volume) -- and that's inherent in the nature of the device-mapper. There's no way for DM to know which blocks are free -- that's the filesystem's job.
And yes, you should be able to do compression at the block level -- or at least, read-only compression, as we see on livecds these days. How would you add
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As a unix user, I generally prefer a layered approach. How did something like ZFS manage to come from unix people for unix, rather than from our friends in Redmond?
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Erm, ZFS is layered; you can put UFS or ext2 or.. whatever, on top of a zpool, complete with RAID, checksumming, copy on write, etc (features which all fit well together in that layer). I don't really see how it's any different from LVM, except zvol's happen to be able to do a bit more between the devices they consume and the devices they provide.
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.
Cool (Score:5, Funny)
The last file system I messed around with was absolute murder.
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
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!!!
Future gains (Score:2)
I appreciate what they're doing, and I sincerely hope that it becomes a viable option within the next 6 months or so.
Cause I'm not using it for anything mission critical before that, anyway.
AdvFS (Score:5, Informative)
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I think I will wait... (Score:5, Funny)
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How come I never have any mod points when someone says something brilliantly funny?!
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How many filesystems (Score:2)
Will linux need to make it "more enterprise ready"?
I think we see this claim to fame almost weekly yet it seems less and less reliance on OS filesystems and more reliance on SAN/Hardware/NAS/NFS storage.
OS filesystem improvements are welcome sight but the headline seems sensational as if all the other filesystems are actually holding adoption back. (which seems absurd)
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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.
paging Mark Crispin (Score:2)
I'd love to hear Mark Crispin's comments on this.
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.
Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin... (Score:5, Funny)
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you have a chance to impart some great information to someone of the past and you want to be a film critic? How lame.
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This is Slashdot! "News for nerds, stuff that matters." What could matter more to a nerd than a bad Star Trek film?!
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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!
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"
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
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Spot on. If you download the sources, there's a README file in the advfs_gen3_src_v1 directory that says:
This directory includes the source code for a second generation
implementation of AdvFS, including the kernel modules, commands
and utilities.
This is the code that was ported to HP-UX. It is functionally
complete and went through fairly extensive functional and stress
testing. However, it should be considered beta quality and so
you may spot bugs. It is recommended that you review the
design documentation
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Nitpick: it was never released with HP-UX. It was originally developed by DEC for their Unix product, originally OSF/1, currently called Tru64.
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.
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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.
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)
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There are a lot of problems with Windows, but one sentiment I've never heard from any Windows admin is, "Gee, I wish I could reformat all my servers to use ext3."
Accommodating the needs of different people is great, but maybe we could accommodate the needs of different people with fewer superfluous choices which ultimately degrade the experience of all of said choices.
Which list of subtle filesystem problems will plague this new entrant into the Linux filesystem melee?
Windows effectively has Old FS and New
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Actually, Apple isn't exactly moving from Old FS (HFS+) to New FS (UFS, née FFS) any time soon. HFS+ is basically required for the boot volume, and HFS+ has a number of features that don't exist in UFS (ACLs, file creation dates, extents, journaling, file type and creator codes, archive timestamps, etc.). That said, HFS+ certainly sucks for a number of reasons, but UFS is no replacement candidate. ZFS has a future with the Xserve and other server uses, but whether ZFS will ever be used on the Apple des
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And that's why SuSE sucks, it still defaults to reiser.
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Exactly! They should just create a data structure and search algorithm with O(1) in all use cases.
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Exactly! They should just create a data structure and search algorithm with O(1) in all use cases.
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Ignoring my grandmothers dying words advising me to not feed the trolls:
\sarcasm{Yes. This is precisely what I'm advocating.}
What part of "take one filesystem and make it good" warrants creating a strawman implying that I'm advocating for the total abolition of filesystems?
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Absolutely! I'm tired of having to pick different filesystems for flash and RAID-0/SCSI-320 volumes when their needs and abilities are obviously identical.
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We were clearly talking about general purpose filesystems here. Tell me again how AdvFS is any more applicable to flash than Ext3, NTFS, or JoeysBBQFS to the flash scenario you've outlined here?
While you're setting up strawmen, you forgot to include iso9660, UDF, 12 dozen network-based filesystems, half a dozen SAN filesystems, etc. etc.
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I must admit I never ventured past the ext* systems myself. I'm sure there'd be some improvements but on the other hand my system was working just fine. I do see that when you're trying to build a Linux server for a specific purpose, like say a database server then it's not all the same though. Msnu file systems show many people care about Linux filesystem performance, I'd be more worried if noone gave a damn. As for the perfect file system, it isn't built yet. Even the ZFS of much praise have trouble doing
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As for "too much choice", you may prefer to solve every problem with a hammer but I prefer a toolbox.
Aha! (Score:2)
Take him for ballast... (Score:2)
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.
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I remember reading responses by kernel devs saying they would not put ZFS into the kernel, regardless of license. IIRC, it was because it violated in so many spectacular ways the concept of layering.
Yes, which is how it is able to do the amazing things that it does. Some of the stuff ZFS does -- and only ZFS does -- is because the storage management and filesystem are merged.
The people who bash ZFS haven't used it, haven't researched it, or both.
Filesystems and BIOSs are interesting (Score:2)
I know that some people (read: sysadmins) definitely do think about their filesystem, but even then its usually only when you are installing a system or in the event something goes wrong.
Tru64 goodness (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm glad I expanded my threshold before I posted the comment I was originally going to post. HP just donated a whole bunch of their code to the community, and people are so ungrateful that they're actually complaining about it. Huh??!
Thanks, HP! :)
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Small File system, native support, please.. please (Score:2)
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Well, ReiserFs handled this by tail packing, while traditionally you're limited to whole FS blocks with ReiserFS you can store multiple small files or the tails of files into a single block.
It's a little bit of a problem though because the FS is now doing more to write files, but from a performance perspective is very good for read performance (stat & file content often stored in the same block). That's very good for creating tar archives of large directory structures quickly which solves half the probl
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.
Agree with first poster - about time (Score:3, Interesting)
But it doesn't go nearly far enough.
HP needs to kill HP/UX, IBM needs to kill AIX, and anybody else with a proprietary UNIX needs to kill it, and donate the source code to Linux. Including Sun with Solaris.
Had they done this ten years ago, Linux would be running the show now, instead of Microsoft.
The big companies have utterly no need for a proprietary UNIX that does nothing but jack up their development costs. Donate the existing code to Linux, wait until what fits and makes Linux sufficiently enterprise-level is adopted, then adopt Linux as their unified platform. Then they can devote development expenses to differentiating themselves with system management software, which is the sort of software open source tends to lag in producing.
By sitting on their asses, all they've done is give Microsoft an opening into the server market. Eventually the server market will be either dominated by Windows or shared equally with Linux, anyway. Nobody's going to care if the proprietary UNIXes go away as long as the necessary features from them are available in Linux.
Re:A new open file system? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A new open file system? (Score:5, Funny)
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Your sarcasm detector needs adjustment.
Re:A new open file system? (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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.
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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.