[ale] Ext4 adoption anyone?

[Pat Regan]

Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> You may want to take a look at Tux3, too.[1,2]  That filesystem looks
> very promising.  It's definitely not ready yet, but I am eagerly
> awaiting it; the approach it takes to versioning seems interesting in
> theory.

I only read the Wikipedia page.  I'm going to be lazy in the interest of
keeping the discussion rolling.

If I read correctly about the versioning taking place at the inode
level, does that mean I can snapshot a subdirectory without snapshotting
the whole volume/subvolume?  If you can, that is a killer feature in my
opinion and something I would REALLY like to have.  I imagine it also
means you'd have to snapshot the inode of each individual
file/directory, too, so it might be a slower snapshotting process.

I might be able to live with that for the extra flexibility.

> Supposedly the FUSE module for ZFS is fast and reliable, have you toyed
> with that?

Almost all my playing around has been with zfs-fuse.  It did work quite
well, but I didn't feel I wanted to use fuse for something as important
as my home directory.

fuse+zfs+raid-z was much faster on a stack of 4 usb 2.0 hard drives than
md+raid5+ext3.  I think it was the journaling that was horking me up for
raid 5, there.

Which got me thinking about something that is somewhat off topic that
I've not yet gotten around to trying.  I wonder how much improvement in
write performance you'd get on an ext3+raid5 if you use an external
journal on a raid1 or raid10 device.

> RCS?  Really?  Sounds kinda painful to me...  ;-)

In general, if I create and edit something it ends up in a Darcs
repository.  If I didn't create it, I probably don't care about it too
much.  In that case, it ends up on in a backup from time to time.

My home directory will definitely end up being whichever stable in
kernel filesystem ends up giving me snapshotting at least as quick and
easy as zfs.

Pat

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