At 8:35 PM -0800 2003/10/29, Peter C. Norton wrote:
[ A cursory google search indicates that hashed dirs, extents, and journalling are all in linux xfs. I can't imagine an unsupported feature making its way into the filesystem that SGI is putting on its latest and greatest systems, but if you know about this, please share ]
My understanding is that the port of XFS to Linux was only about 70% done at the time the critical software engineers were laid off by SGI, and that no further work in this area has been done. Maybe the features are supposedly there but incomplete.
However reiserfs was built to handle a mix of lots of small files, ala maildir or mh spools.
I'm sorry, I don't trust ReiserFS at all. I'd trust XFS if it was on Irix, or IBMs JFS, but not ReiserFS. Hell, on a Linux system, I'd use ext2fs before I'd use Reiser.
I'm not too current on current bsd going-ons, but I'd bet that ffs2 has something to offer in this arena, too, since it looks like it almost does extent-based allocation now.
No, not yet. There are improvements in the areas of handling synchronous meta-data updates, background fsck, etc... but nothing like extent-based filesystems or integrated hashed directory schemes, etc....
Err... then to relate this to a prior post, why not just use maildirs on filesystems that are engineered to handle that sort of thing?
Because we can't guarantee that everyone (or anyone) would be willing/able to use the selected filesystems that we have blessed? You think requiring everyone to install PostgreSQL would be bad, do you really want to try to force them all to use ReiserFS on Linux as their only supported option?
Unless you are using a filesystem that works for this, right? Like xfs, vxfs, reiserfs, and probably ffs2. I believe that linux's ext3 has support for hashing directories (or soon will - I don't precisely know as I've been focusing on other things)
My understanding is that ext3fs is dead. The work that Stephen Tweedie had been doing stopped long ago, and even then it was only a minor tweak over ext2fs. I don't believe that this work has been picked up again or extended to include other features.
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