Re: HP opensourced advfs from tru64 and what it means for btrfs

[Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 22:45 +0400, Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 02:21:09PM -0400, Chris Mason (chris.mason@oracle.com) wrote:
> > > Sure it is interesting as studing anything new, but there is nothing in
> > > advfs which can prevent btrfs from success. Virtually nothing.
> > > Advfs is quite old technology built on top of almost 20 years old ideas
> > > and hardware, while the former can still be (and likely is) valid,
> > > hardware made significant progress.
> > 
> > In general, the rules that make filesystems go haven't changed in a long
> > time.   Disks are slow, ram is faster, and cpu is both infinitely fast
> > and important to share with other things running on the hardware.
> 
> I believe if things are that simple, you would not start btrfs? :)
> 

Grin, just because everyone knows the rules doesn't mean you shouldn't
try playing.  SSD does change the dynamics as well in ways that I think
btrfs is best suited to handle.

The idea is that well established filesystems can teach us quite a lot
about layout, and about the optimizations that were added in response to
customer demand.  Having the code to these optimizations is very useful.

-chris