Copy on write filesystems can probably be optimized for SMR by using TRIM commands to punch holes and rewrite the content sequentially in a new zone. Afaik both zfs and btrfs have plans to do this.
That way they can be useful for more than archival.
That way they can be useful for more than archival.
However since I initially saw the news of these drives a few days ago Samsung also axed some Linux devs, which gives me pause and makes me reconsider the long term viability of this filesystem...
I believe Ceph now has abstracted the drives away through BlueStore, which simply puts a large RocksDB database on the drive, bypassing most of the functionality a filesystem offers. It should be much easier to make an SMR compatible version of the LSM-tree backend of RocksDB, than writing a full-blown file system.
RocksDB is one of several possible backends for object maps. There is a lot more to BlueStore than just omaps.
Also, BlueStore was actually designed with SMR drives in mind, however certain components of it are best placed on solid state media.
Does that mean the drives simply will not work with an unaware filesystem or that it will work but performance will be poor?