ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

[Zach Brown <zab@zabbo.net>]

Greetings -fsdevel,

Today we at Versity are opening the code to ScoutFS, the clustered file
system that we've been developing as part of our larger software stack
that supports large scale archives.

The motivation for the project and the architectural decisions that
we've made can be found in the white paper that is linked off of
https://www.scoutfs.org/ .   We've also set up a
scoutfs-devel@scoutfs.org development mailing list and have an open
Slack channel, both are linked off of the scoutfs.org site.

The README.md in the kernel module github repo at
https://github.com/versity/scoutfs-kmod-dev/ describes the quick steps
needed to get a system up and running.

For the expert audience, here's the overview of the project:

 - Clustered file system using a shared block device.
 - Shared LSM indexing of metadata to encourage concurrent updates.
 - Integrated archival interfaces (indexing, "offline" extent tracking).
 - Batch locking to reduce the cost of enforcing full POSIX.
 - Initial development targets RHEL/CentOS kernels.
 - What you'd expect: atomic transactions, metadata checksums, extents.

This code can be considered a rough beta.  The large architectural
structures are there for review, and what is implemented has been well
exercised, but a lot remains to be implemented before we declare the
format fixed and submit the code upstream.

We're opening the project early to give the community the opportunity to
contribute to the design and implementation.

In the coming weeks I'll personally be focusing on some big ticket
functional items (deleted inode cleanup in particular),  hardening a few
recovery cases after crashes, and in general spending all of my will
power focusing on that responsible nonsense instead of getting lost in
satisfying performance tuning.

Ask me anything :),

- z