Re: what is our answer to ZFS?

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

Hi!

> > If It happenned, Sun or someone has port it to linux.
> > We will need some VFS changes to handle 128 bit FS as "Jörn ENGEL"
> > mentionned previous mail in this thread. Is there any plan or action
> > to make VFS handle 128 bit File Sytems like ZFS or future 128 bit
> > File Systems ? Any VFS people reply to this, please?
> 
> I believe that on 64 bit platforms, Linux has a 64 bit clean VFS.  Python says 
> 2**64 is 18446744073709551616, and that's roughly:
> 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes
> 18,446,744,073,709 megs
> 18,446,744,073 gigs
> 18,446,744 terabytes
> 18,446 ...  what are those, petabytes?
> 18 Really big lumps of data we won't be using for a while yet.
> 
> And that's just 64 bits.  Keep in mind it took us around fifty years to burn 
> through the _first_ thirty two (which makes sense, since Moore's Law says we 
> need 1 more bit every 18 months).  We may go through it faster than we went 
> through the first 32 bits, but it'll last us a couple decades at least.
> 
> Now I'm not saying we won't exhaust 64 bits eventually.  Back to chemistry, it 
> takes 6.02*10^23 protons to weigh 1 gram, and that's just about 2^79, so it's 
> feasible that someday we might be able to store more than 64 bits of data per 
> gram, let alone in big room-sized clusters.   But it's not going to be for 
> years and years, and that's a design problem for Sun.
> 
> Sun is proposing it can predict what storage layout will be efficient for as 
> yet unheard of quantities of data, with unknown access patterns, at least a 
> couple decades from now.  It's also proposing that data compression and 
> checksumming are the filesystem's job.  Hands up anybody who spots 
> conflicting trends here already?  Who thinks the 128 bit requirement came 
> from marketing rather than the engineers?

Actually, if you are storing information in single protons, I'd say
you _need_ checksumming :-).

[I actually agree with Sun here, not trusting disk is good idea. At
least you know kernel panic/oops/etc can't be caused by bit corruption on
the disk.]

								Pavel
-- 
Thanks, Sharp!
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