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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

Linux just loves good filesystems (not).

The way they are handling ZFS reminds me of the way they handled Reiser4, Tux3 and Reiserfs.

Basically, any filesystem not made by the filesystem establishment (and their friends) gets bullied. Of course, the only filesystems they can make are all crap like ext4 and btrfs.

Fortunately, there's the BSDs, and there's the likes of HAMMER2 from Dragonfly.

And, with seL4[0], Fuchsia and HarmonyOS making progress, Linux is going to fall into irrelevance, sooner than most think.

Good riddance.

[0]: https://sel4.systems/About/seL4-whitepaper.pdf

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> the way they handled Reiser4, Tux3 and Reiserfs

Reiserfs is in-tree. Reiser4 failed after losing its lead dev, but my impression was that it was on-track to become the next Linux filesystem of choice. I have no clue about Tux3.

> Basically, any filesystem not made by the filesystem establishment (and their friends) gets bullied.

Linux has XFS from IRIX and JFS from AIX; the only way to have that and a "filesystem establishment" conspiracy is to resort to no-true-scotsman.

> Of course, the only filesystems they can make are all crap like ext4 and btrfs.

I'll agree that BTRFS is ... suboptimal, but what do you have against ext4? I'd like it to have data checksums and maybe CoW, but it's been the workhorse of the Linux world for ages and performs quite well, and even has some nice new features like encryption in recent times.

>Reiserfs is in-tree.

Yes it is, but it got bullied either way. Linux filesystem devs made incompatible changes to it against the ReiserFS teams' wishes, breaking it. IIRC it had to do with ACL support.

> The way they are handling ZFS reminds me of the way they handled Reiser4, Tux3 and Reiserfs.

The latter file systems were trying to be upstreamed and ultimately did not succeed, I don't know of any interest or attempts at upstreaming ZFS. Their handling of ZFS reminds me how they handle any kernel module that will never be upstream, not because some file system establishment sees it as a threat.

> Basically, any filesystem not made by the filesystem establishment (and their friends) gets bullied.

What/who is the "establishment (and their friends)"?

f2fs from Samsung was added in 3.8, erofs from Huawei was added in 5.4, and exfat from Samsung was added in 5.7. Before those file systems were upstreamed I don't think many people would list Samsung and Huawei as part of the filesystem "establishment".

>What/who is the "establishment (and their friends)"?

Maybe he thinks of Linux Foundation Platinum Members ;)

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/

XFS is actually really good, but Linux definitely need's a check-summing COW Filesystem that's usable.

FWIW, we do have CoW on XFS, but yeah no data-checksumming other than BTRFS. Hopefully bcachefs will be the go-to option someday.

Yes true and check-summing for metadata too, but not for the data. I have bigger hopes for XFS then bcachefs (maturity and really great dev's) but hopefully not that Stratis-thing from redhat....that sound's like a terrible idea.

Writeback latency spikes and lack of data checksums is the main issue with ext4 and xfs.

Btrfs has the checksums, but is a toy.

To my knowledge, NILFS2 (by NTT) is still the best filesystem Linux has in mainline. And, ironically, practically nobody does use it.

Does NILFS2 ensure data integrity? [0] claims that it doesn't actually check data checksums, but that's from 2011...

[0] https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-nilfs/msg01063.html

Yes it does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NILFS#Additional_features

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