On Tue, 2007-11-20 at 01:23 -0800, Lionel Debroux wrote: > > > On the negative side: > > * no support for ext2/3 partitions ? > > The main issue here is licensing I believe. The FUSE project will > hopefully be bringing ext2/ext3 compatibility to our world: > > http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/fuse/ Grumble, licensing > issues... On the one side, Linux cannot implement DTrace because of a) > licensing, and b) a bit of Not Invented Here (according to Brian > Cantrill). Linux cannot implement ZFS in the kernel because of a) > licensing, and it seems also b) unwillingness to break the layered > approach. On the other side OpenSolaris cannot implement in the kernel > the most used filesystem in the Linux world, ext2/3/4, because of > licensing. > > That said: * DTrace and ZFS are arguably competitive advantages of > Solaris, and now MacOS X 10.5 to a lesser extent, while ext2/3/4 is > not a real competitive advantage of Linux; * ntfs-3g shows that fast, > featureful & reliable userspace filesystem implementations are > possible. A full-featured FUSE implementation of ext2/3/4 should be > doable - at least, easier than making ZFS-FUSE full-featured.
There is already work in that area - see: ext2fuse http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fuse fuse-umfuse-ext2 http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/view-os/ or ext2-in-user-space http://code.google.com/p/ext2-in-user-space/ I'm not sure how functional they are but they should be trivial to get going with FUSE on Solaris. I also heard that someone is working on a "native" ext2/3 fs driver for Solaris... > > I know flattening licensing issues is very hard, but when license > issues are preventing or making harder progress in the mostly-open > world, the completely-closed world wins... In the case of ext2/3, FUSE actually makes it easier to get a working filesystem than a native port so I'm not sure licensing is really an issue here. In fact instead of porting you just need to re-compile! -Mark _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
