> Steve, lemme try again.
>
> For production (business/academic/???) users, people for whom a change in
> filesystem is a flag day that costs $$, a choice to switch to a kernel that
> is only provided by SGI is a tough one. I don't know how I'd justify such a
> thing. The old question of support/maintainance/longevity is a real tough
> one to wave away in that case.
>
> What would you say to such a user in making the case to use an XFS kernel,
> when technical arguments alone won't do?
Yes, you definitely need a support scenario, which means a major distribution
carrying xfs is a must. Mandrake has just started doing so in their 8.1
release. We are working on system call issues before another major distrib
will consider us, others probably depend on being in Alan or Linus's
kernel (although RedHat has some large chunks of kernel code in their
tree which is not in Linus's kernel).
I am still confident we will get to this stage, but I really have no way
of predicting when, and we are absolutely pegged out around here with all
sorts of other work, I personally do not have the required bandwidth
now to wage campaigns to get xfs into kernels and distributions, that
would be a pretty much full time job.
As you state, 'given the current financial state of the industry', I sort
of feel compelled to work on these other projects which have a much higher
potential for a financial return for SGI within the forseeable future
than Linux XFS does (plus my management pretty much insists I make then
my priority).
Steve
>
> --
> Alan Eldridge
> from std_disclaimer import *
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