Tux3 File System Could Finally Make It Into the Mainline Linux Kernel

An anonymous reader writes "The Tux3 file-system that's been in development since 2008 as the public replacement to the patent-blocked Tux2 file-system is now under review for inclusion into the Linux kernel. Tux3 tries to act as a 'light, tight, modern file-system. We offer a fresh approach to some ancient problems,' according to its lead developer, Daniel Phillips. Tux3 strives for minimal resource consumption but lacks enterprise-grade reliability at this point. Tux3, at the end of the day, tries to be 'robust, fast, and simple' with the Linux FS reportedly being as fast as other well known file-systems. Details on the project are at Tux3.org."

NIHFS?

[BaronM]

First off, I think that 'better than ZFS' is a good and legitimate goal, seeing as how ZFS is very, very good, but not perfect.

That said, there's also BTFS and HAMMER aiming to be 'better than ZFS'.

I know: everyone wants to scratch their own itch, and there is no reason that multiple projects in the same area should necessarily been see as competing, and if I'm unhappy about it, I should just go write my own instead of complaining. Did I cover everything? :)

I just wonder sometimes if Linux wouldn't have moved beyond EXT4, X11, and the desktop environment wars if the 'not invented here' syndrome were just a little less prevalent.

Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs

[Anonymous Coward]

and they expect to be competitive with ZFS?? They have a LOT of work to do.

It's just another run of the mill linux filesystem which is to say completely useless.
The only real viable filesystems on linux are XFS, followed by EXT 4 and BTRFS (only in experimental form).

Re:parent delays

[NotInHere]

Politicians could at least recognize the faster pace in the IT world compared to other technology industries, and lessen the patent terms for software patents.

I also don't know why there should be a difference between a patent troll and a large company with lots of 'defensive' patents suing other companies because of "swipe to unlock" features.

Backstory

[eclectro]

This is the story of the patents involved. [swpat.org] It's not so much that there was any litigation, but rather the ongoing threat that there would be (for arguably stuff that was already being done.)

Re:NIHFS?

[Bengie]

OpenZFS. They're getting rid of "versions" and just having "Feature flags". This will allow you to create ZFS pools on one system, and just make sure what ever features that are only supported on another target system, are enable when you create the pool.

Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs

[dbIII]

I disagree. The different approach of ZFS means it should be far better than btrfs when you have many disks, yet it makes almost no sense at all with single disks which is where btrfs makes sense.
Different tools for different jobs.

Re:Ambitious but not much has happened in 6 yrs

[Jody Bruchon]

This is probably irrelevant for you, but I ran into issues with software running on i386 with XFS and newer kernels. Programs not compiled with -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 used the 32-bit versions of certain file-related system calls, and the default mount options for XFS changed at some point to allow 64-bit inode numbers to be created. What would happen is the program would readdir and choke the instant it hit a file or directory on an inode number greater than 2^32; the fstat calls returned EOVERFLOW and processing aborted. You'd go into a directory with GQView, for example, and mysteriously see i.e. three images and one directory where you knew there were tens of directories and hundreds of images.

Obviously, x86_64 platforms don't have this issue, but I was operating an i386 server since 2008 until just a few months ago and I found it to be extremely annoying and (at first) difficult to figure out what was happening. There is surprisingly little information about XFS and 64-bit file syscall issues when all you have is strace spouting EOVERFLOW at you and don't immediately pin the issue to the filesystem in use.