Re: XFS...Windows?

[Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>]

Just to be clear about what's being discussed here: 

The proposal is to create a *windows* filesystem driver to allow Windows
machines to read and write locally-attached XFS filesystems, correct?

Presumably, such filesystems would be device-portable to Linux or other
machines also running XFS?

Cheers,
-- jr 'will ask stupid questions for food' a

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Shaun Gosse" <sgosse@sgi.com>
> To: "Yuji Saeki" <yuji1@mail.com>, xfs@oss.sgi.com
> Sent: Monday, December 9, 2013 11:16:38 AM
> Subject: RE: XFS...Windows?
> Well…at the risk of jumping into something here:
> 
> “would SGI be okay with that”: keep in mind this a community project.
> There are contributors to XFS here at SGI. There is also a lot of work
> done by employees of Redhat as well as other companies (and a few
> freelance / people interested regardless of current position). Anyhow,
> just a quibble to note that it’s not a question of what SGI dictates.
> Although I will note that I’ve actually raised the idea of XFS on
> Windows internally (here at SGI) and while it’s not a priority I would
> say there’s at least some interest. At the least, if you build it,
> we’ll certainly take a look at it. ☺
> 
> I saw an email a while back on this list that implied someone was
> trying to work on that iirc; I didn’t see any follow-up from it. There
> are also some projects that look abandoned which tried to do this I
> recall from previous searches on this.
> 
> One of the suggestions I heard when I was considering this was to look
> at how the ext port on Windows works. That looks mildly inactive
> itself but should be good for comparison.
> 
> Internally, SGI has a proprietary system, CXFS, which does clustered
> XFS including Windows as client nodes. So we’ve got code that actually
> does XFS data writes from Windows nodes. Of course, the tricky bit is
> managing all of the metadata/logging, which isn’t touched from Windows
> in that system, but it’s just another tidbit to note “yes, this type
> of system should be possible”.
> 
> As far as licensing, I’m certainly no expert, but AFAIK it should be
> possible to use the same GPL license as you note and make an
> open-source Windows driver for this using as much of the current XFS
> code as is convenient. There are nuances in the license though. I can
> try to find the article if you’re interested: I read a post previously
> by someone who had developed a GPL driver on Windows and was noting
> concerns about linking against closed source libraries (essentially
> decided it was okay because it (a) could be considered a system
> library and (b) they were starting a fresh project so they could add
> extra exemptions specifically allowing that).
> 
> I am a novice at XFS and, frankly, at Windows kernel device
> development as well. But I’m certainly interested in seeing a GPL
> XFS-on-Windows developed at some point. If you go ahead with this, I’d
> definitely appreciate any information and would be glad to assist in
> any way I can. And myself personally, I’d absolutely appreciate
> someone else taking the lead on this, because with other issues I’m
> working on, I would be unlikely to put serious solo effort into this
> anytime soon.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Shaun Gosse
> CXFS Windows
> SGI
> 
> From: xfs-bounces@oss.sgi.com [mailto:xfs-bounces@oss.sgi.com] On
> Behalf Of Yuji Saeki
> Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2013 5:25 PM
> To: xfs@oss.sgi.com
> Subject: XFS...Windows?
> 
> Congratulations on your file system, it’s quite nice. I’ve benchmarked
> it myself, it’s very impressive. I’m curious though, is there are
> thought to a Windows driver? If someone ported the most current-stable
> version to Windows (free) under the same license ‘GNU Lesser General
> Public License’ with entire credit to XFS, would SGI be okay with
> that? A ‘no-warranty implied’ (etc) kind of protection of course.
> Quite a few devs that I work with enjoy the XFS filesystem and we dev
> in both Linux and Windows. We’re very interested in making this happen
> with respect to the XFS project.
> 
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-- 
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Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra@baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274

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