Linux Summit will preview new advanced file system

[Kane Adams]

Although computers get bigger, run faster and accomplish more amazing feats all the time, they still store data in a 1970s-era file system. But that may be about to change.

 

Speaking at the Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit this week, Ted Ts'o, a Linux Foundation fellow, and Chris Mason, Oracle's director of kernel engineering, will provide a sneak peak of the file systems of the future at the New York City brainstorming session, whose purpose is to foster interaction between leading Linux developers and the most advanced users and, in turn, to accelerate development of the Linux platform.

 

The problem with contemporary file systems, Ts'o said, is that -- following Moore's Law -- file sizes have grown bigger, and disk drives have doubled in capacity every couple of years. While the file system error rate per megabyte has remained constant, the increase in volume has created performance and quality control problems for large data centers, which find data more difficult to manage, he said.

 

In addition, data centers today want to be able to do things they didn't dream of in the 1970s, like merge data from multiple hard drives, Ts'o said. Another challenge is the switch from conventional hard drives to solid-state disks, which use less power and retrieve data at a uniform rate irrespective of location but have lower overall performance than hard drives, he said. So file systems today need to be adaptable to the hardware people want to use and how they actually use it, he said.

 

But changing the file system to fix the scalability and functional limitations of ext3, the default file system in many popular Linux distributions, requires a significant education outreach. Because the consequences of data loss are so severe, data center managers are reluctant to trust their data to new file systems, Ts'o said. New-system information needs to be shared well ahead of time, including a roadmap of coming features so IT professionals know what to expect, he said. That's where the Linux Foundation's event hopes to make inroads.

 

 

 

 

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[Alessandro17]

Finally somebody is going to pay attention to what I have considered a serious problem for a while now. None of the existing Linux file systems is all that great, IMO. Reiser4 was declared stable years ago, but we all know what happened.