Porting Commercial file systems to Linux

Abstract

Recently, SGI and Veritas have announced that they intend to port their advanced file system technologies to Linux. Veritas' VxFS and SGI's XFS file system both employ journaling and scalable internal data structures that allow very large files and directories to be supported. VxFS and XFS both use the vnode/vfs interface structure popularized in System V UNIX. The vnode interface differs from Linux's virtual file system in several respects, and these differences must be overcome in porting vnode-based file systems to Linux. In this paper and talk, the authors will describe their efforts in porting SGI's XFS file system to Linux. This port is an on-going joint effort between SGI, the GFS Group at the University of Minnesota, and Sistina Software, a firm developing storage management software for Linux. Issues addressed will include integrating vnode-like features into Linux's vfs interface, buffer and page cache integration, journaling, volume management, and achievable performance.

Speaker Bio

Jim Mostek is the technical lead of the XFS Linux port at SGI. Jim has a Math and Computer Science degree from the University of Illinois. He has over 18 years of extensive experience in file systems and networking including: key CXFS developer, extensive internals experience with XFS, DFS, threads, File System Switch (FSS), VFS, UNIX streams, and sockets. Jim's primary experience has been with UNIX based systems of various flavors including BSD, PWB, SystemV, IRIX, and UNICOS.