Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 28 Nov 2005 13:53:51 +0100 | From | Lars Marowsky-Bree <> | Subject | Re: what is our answer to ZFS? |
| |
On 2005-11-21T11:19:59, Jörn Engel <joern@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> wrote:
> o Merge of LVM and filesystem layer > Not done. This has some advantages, but also more complexity than > seperate LVM and filesystem layers. Might be considers "not worth > it" for some years.
This is one of the cooler ideas IMHO. In effect, LVM is just a special case filesystem - huge blocksizes, few files, mostly no directories, exports block instead of character/streams "files".
Why do we need to implement a clustered LVM as well as a clustered filesystem? Because we can't re-use across this boundary and not stack "real" filesystems, so we need a pseudo-layer we call volume management. And then, if by accident we need a block device from a filesystem again, we get to use loop devices. Does that make sense? Not really.
(Same as the distinction between character and block devices in the kernel.)
Look at how people want to use Xen: host the images on OCFS2/GFS backing stores. In effect, this uses the CFS as a cluster enabled volume manager.
If they'd be better integrated (ie: be able to stack filesystems), we could snapshot/RAID single files (or ultimately, even directories trees) just like today we can snapshot whole block devices.
Sincerely, Lars Marowsky-Brée <lmb@suse.de>
-- High Availability & Clustering SUSE Labs, Research and Development SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - A Novell Business -- Charles Darwin "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |