Haiku file system

Forum thread started by Setlec on Wed, 2011-03-23 15:50

i was wondering about the BeFS did it get some upgrades or is it still the same since BeOS R5? Would it be possible to add a native ZFS (Solaris File system)?

just curious.... Cheers

Comments

Re: Haiku file system

AFAIK its the same implementation of the BFS with some very minute changes. For all intensive purposes I belive it is identical.

Re: Haiku file system

There's some detail and a list of differences over here:

Adding ZFS to Haiku would be very cool, but someone would have to volunteer to do it. It would take some work.

Re: Haiku file system

Aside for speed, what improvements do you see needed for Haiku-FS? All the ideas I have seem to be more work than the developers are willing to spend time on. The things I would be interested in have limited uses to others like:

1) Snapshots - Uses a lot of hard drive space.

2) File level versions - Will need a change in the user interface.

3) Combining (1) and (2) - Does not use so much hard drive space but still has user design questions.

4) Partition positioning - better control of the start/end of partitions will help the performance of SSDs.

5) Backup SuperBlock - In writing my file recovery program I was surprised to find there were no backups of the root directory data contained in the SuperBlock. (My superblock had been wiped)

May I ask why you would want ZFS for Haiku? I don't see the need for it on a desktop OS, is there something about it that you really miss like snapshots?

Re: Haiku file system

Earl, most file system have a tiny flaw in my opinion... the most important thing about a file system to me is data protection. By data protection i mean protection against hardware failure which zfs offers by hashing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_Integrity) which is a holy feature... I use many HDD for work but i can't have the luxury of mirroring my HDD my motherboard allows 6 HDD and i have 4 TB of data.

Re: Haiku file system

Hashing the data on a hard drive will only tell you if the data is corrupted or not. You really want support for RAID and/or ECC (error correcting code) to protect your data. However, on the lowest level of operation hard drives already use ECC so you really need a raid system.

Interestingly that is a feature I am looking at writing into my next ram-drive which I intend to have back itself up to a hard drive at regular intervals, I have already considered it to be a good idea for it to write it's backup to more than one storage device. This is not true raid, but it would help protect the data if there was a power failure. And yes I would use hashing myself to see which copy is valid.

I just read the URL you supplied. Notice it too says that hashing in itself does not ensure the data is recoverable. However, I do agree that the data recovery feature of ZFS is nice to have, I think the checksum feature can be added to BeFS as there is plenty space in the internal structures to add them. Data recovery would be harder to add.

Re: Haiku file system

yeah, data recovery is the key feature that i would like to most, it's also true that you mentioned about checksum doesn't ensure data recovery. those two feature would be awesome to have in any fs. i use etx4 on my pc and i had all headers of one partition that went missing and data recovery is impossible. i probably have to make a data storage server with opensolaris or any opensolaris based distro.