On Sun, 14 Oct 2001 at 08:20, Alan Eldridge wrote:
> Steve, lemme try again.
I'm not Steve (Lord, that is, there are other Steves of filesystem fame,
like Steve Best, for instance), but I'll give it a shot anyway. :)
> 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 tend to agree with you, although the fact that XFS on Linux is GPL'd
should mean at least something (ie: should SGI ever decide to drop support
for it, people can continue as of the latest source code released under
GPL).
Perhaps the CVS server provided by SGI can be considered something like,
say, a "donation" (in some ways it may be, in some ways not)?
> 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.
I don't know if Seth Mos ever was with SGI, but I don't think he's with
SGI anymore. I'm not really sure. What I'm positive about, though, is that
Seth is still very active in the list and handles the upkeep of the FAQ,
which is hosted in SGI. There were also those SGI layoffs that even got
Slashdotted, specifically because a number of XFS developers had to go. I
do believe they're somehow still active. Not quite as much as when they
were paid to be given that they have other day jobs to attend to, but
still...
> What would you say to such a user in making the case to use an XFS
> kernel, when technical arguments alone won't do?
It's GPL'd. Worst case scenario we can all pitch in and try to understand
the code from wherever it left off. And it's not like the XFS code is in
its infancy. It's quite mature (very well tested on IRIX, and the Linux
port is awesome), so we won't have to reinvent things anyway, just
understand and maintain.
This doesn't say that XFS won't or shouldn't be pushed to the mainstream
kernel. But it's a hell of a lot of work, and I don't think the SGI guys
are being paid to focus their lives on cutting out all the duplication.
They _can_, but we all only have so much time. If there's something the
community can do it's probably pitch in. And I know for a fact that the
SGI guys listen. We've already seen help from that guy from NEC who was
listened to when he some stuff for xfsdump, I think it was (one of the
userland tools).
And I do believe getting XFS to 2.5 and then 2.6 is on the top priority
todo list of Steve Lord and company. :)
--> Jijo
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Federico Sevilla III :: jijo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Network Administrator :: The Leather Collection, Inc.
GnuPG Key: <http://jijo.leathercollection.ph/jijo.gpg>
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