On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, John Haverty wrote:
> Thanks for the release of 1.2 and all your work, but I would like to request
> that because of RedHat 8's near un-useable broken state, that 1.2-release
> patches be made for the 7.x kernel series which is conveniently unified.
If we had pointed our limited resources towards Red Hat 7.3, we would be
reading a similar plea for 8.0 support this evening. :)
There are two problems here; we cannot support every Red Hat (or other
vendor) release, and Red Hat has chosen not to support XFS at all.
Our choice in the past has been to support the most recent Red Hat
kernel, if possible, because we know that we do have a lot of Red Hat users.
I imagine that a backport to a Red Hat 7.3 kernel would not be too bad,
perhaps if you or someone in the Linux community can do this, it would
be well received.
Encouraging Red Hat to support XFS would also be a good thing.
> RedHat 8 is a desktop candy coated OS and XFS is a serious filesystem for
> serious users and big iron machines. Also, I feel that FreeBSD is more than
> deserving of at least an experimental port of XFS.
There are some licensing issues here, and also some time == money issues.
SGI is highly unlikely to release XFS under a BSD license, because our
competitors could quickly integrate it into their products. Even a
GPL'd stand-alone product for BSD is unlikely to be produced by SGI, because
frankly there is not much incentive to spend the time doing this. SGI
has Linux products, but not BSD.
Those are my opinions, not an official SGI stance, btw. :)
-Eric
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