+1 I would have liked to have seen more discussion on the benefits to OpenSolaris by supporting ext2/3.
Certainly it is a very interesting academic exercise to support this file system, and I am sure much will be learned by all who participate in this project from the creation of the necessary source code. But ext2 is basically obsolete. I think Red Hat Linux switched to ext3 back in 2002/3. So I think ext2 will only be used by a very small minority. And even if we get to a stage of ext3 support there is still the issue that Cyril pointed to, that LVM is now used by default by many Linux distributions. And the Linux people are working on ext4... The OpenSolaris ext3 project will need to provide very high quality code and must be rigorously tested to avoid any nasty data corruption issues. (I assume we are talking about full read/write here.) So there is a lot of work to be done before we have anything that is really useful in today's world. Even then, Milan Jurik warns that: > Sharing home directories between two OSes can be dangerous, because some > applications can be surprised that their configs are for other versions > of them. Do people see this ext2/3 as helping interoperability? But then this is only an issue if you want to share data between partitions on the same PC, when dual-booting Linux & Solaris. Do many people really want/need to do this? Surely most people will have separate PC's for Linux and Solaris and share data with something like NFS across the network. Is it the idea that the ext2/3 filesystem will be a viable alternative to UFS (or ZFS) when installing/booting OpenSolaris? Has anyone yet ascertained if there is any documentation for ext3 ? Hopefully the project page will link to the documentation for ext2. Will the GNU e2fsprogs need some patching to run on OpenSolaris? Are the underlying API's different on Solaris to Linux? Regards Nigel Smith This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
