SGI is pouring lots of $$ into getting XFS into the Open Source
community. There have been as many as 14 internal people working
on the project. Right now, there are engineers/contractors in Denmark,
Canada, Minnesota, California, and Australia working on this project.
Part of the XFS port involved making modification to Linux itself.
Have you heard of pagebuf? We have exchange e-mail/phone
conferences/... with the ReiserFS and JFS people about joining us
with the pagebuf work. Pagebuf should be usable by other file systems.
There are some (but few) "external hackers" helping with the code.
Since we open sourced, about 4-5 patches have come in from people
outside SGI.
All of the XFS code is now unencumbered. The final source files
were completed in March.
I don't think we should view the JFS, ReiserFS, XFS code as
being in competition. These groups should work together to make
Linux a better OS. Each file system will make its mark. XfS is
fully multi-threaded and highly scalable. It is also journaled
and has other capabilities like Direct I/O, extended attributes,
DMAPI, GRIO, ... Some of these capabilities require changes
outside the file system and this work should be done with others.
The XFS team is looking forward to working with others and
will be attending Usenix (Freenix track) and other conferences
where we should meet and discuss future joint work.
Jim
>
>Dear Jim
>
>I was actually aware of an early release of xfs, but I was told by sgi that
>it was still encumbered by licencing restrictions on parts of the code.
>
>Additioanlly, it seemed that contrary to IBM, sgi was putting very limited
>resources of its own into the project and was instead almost entirely
>relying on external hackers to complete the project.
>
>Is that true? Can you clarify?
>
>Many thanks for writing.
>
>Kind regards
>
>Moshe Bar
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jim Mostek [mailto:mostek@xxxxxxx]
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2000 7:20 PM
>> To: moshe@xxxxxxxxxxx
>> Cc: linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: Article in byte.com
>>
>>
>>
>> Moshe,
>>
>> In your article http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20000524S0007, it
>> appears you are unaware that SGI has released the XFS code. This was done
>> a few months ago and the announcements appeared in slashdot and other
>> places.
>>
>> Many thousands of people have downloaded XFS and are playing with it.
>> We have an entire 2.3 kernel tree available for download. (see
>> http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs).
>>
>> All file system functionality is there, but there are all kinds
>> of bugs still in the code. We are also adding more XFS functionality
>> before first release. The current source even has "delayed" allocation
>> implemented where each writes do not result in an allocation. This is
>> pretty rough right now and needs more work, but the main code is there.
>>
>> The implementation is not beta or alpha quality, yet. We expect to have a
>> beta quality version in the coming months.
>>
>> FYI,
>>
>> Jim
>>
>
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