Re: [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

Andrew Morton
2006-06-09T22:13:41Z

Sonny Rao <sonny@burdell.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 10:35:43AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> <snip>
> > All that being said, Linux's filesystems are looking increasingly crufty
> > and we are getting to the time where we would benefit from a greenfield
> > start-a-new-one.
>
> I'm curious about this comment; in what way are they _collectively_
> looking crufty ?

We seem to be lagging behind "the industry" in some areas - handling large
devices, high bandwidth IO, sophisticated on-disk data structures, advanced
manageability, etc.

I mean, although ZFS is a rampant layering violation and we can do a lot of
the things in there (without doing it all in the fs!) I don't think we can
do all of it.

We're continuing to nurse along a few basically-15-year-old filesystems
while we do have the brains, manpower and processes to implement a new,
really great one.

It's just this feeling I have ;)