Re: [Tux3] Tux3 report: A Golden Copy

Justin P. Mattock
2009-01-02T23:11:50Z

Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On Friday 02 January 2009 12:17, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
>
>> Am Mittwoch 31 Dezember 2008 schrieb Justin P. Mattock:
>>
>>> I guess this is what is confusing to me:
>>> atomic commit, btree-based versioning.
>>>
>> Ah, the buzz words. ;)
>>
>> The tux3 mailing list contains quite some design notes about these
>> concepts. I think others can give better answers about these concepts - I
>> think I understood what it is for, not the implementation details. But
>> basically "atomic commit" is a strategy to have the filesystem always in
>> a consistent state
>>
>
> Right. Atomic commit is a term that came from the database world and
> was first applied to filesystems in an LKML message from Victor
> Yodaiken back in 1998 as I dimly recall, and I adopted it to describe
> the tree ased atomic update strategy I was developing for Tux2 at the
> time. Tux3 uses a new logging variant that is supposed to avoid the
> write-twice behaviour of journalling and the recursive copy behavior of
> WAFL, ZFS and Btrfs, so should be pretty good at synchronous write
> loads and generally reduce write traffic.
>
>
>> and btree-based versioning allows to keep different
>> versions of a file / directory around. And unlike other filesystem tux3
>> has this per inode and not for the complete filesystem. At least if I
>> understand correctly.
>>
>
> You do.
>
> "Btree-based" and "versioning" are separate buzzwords. Tux3 is a btree
> of btrees: the inode table is a btree, containing files that are
> btrees. It was conceived to demonstrate a new method of versioning
> files that puts the versioning information at the btree leaves instead
> of having multiple independently rooted trees sharing subtrees:
>
> Versioned pointers: a new method of representing snapshots
> http://lwn.net/Articles/288896/
>
> This approach lends itself to per-object versioning: each data pointer
> and each inode attribute has its own version label. Making it work
> per file and even per directory is a matter of clever mapping tricks to
> turn global version numbers into per pointer version numbers.
>
> But note that versioning support is still just a nice demo: the focus
> has shifted to Tux3 as general purpose filesystem, with versioning
> seen as a feature to be integrated after the basic Ext3-class
> functionality is solid and reviewed.
>
>
>> But at least it should clear that tux3 is a filesystem and not a video
>> game ;).
>>
>
> It's kind of like a video game where you sneak through IRC channels
> trying to frag bugs with your BFG.
>
> Regards,
>
> Daniel
>
>
The game that came to mind when I first
heard of tux3(I had to google a bit to find the name)
was tux racer. :^)
quick question:
what is the state for security file labeling for
SELinux on this filesystem?

regards;

Justin P. Mattock