Subject: what's it take to get a journaling filesystem?
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Sean Davis <dive-nb@endersgame.net>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/12/2005 22:39:18
Okay, time for me to ante up. I've been trying to help provide debug info on
a bug causing deadlock for several days now, and have become quite
frustrated with the time it takes to fsck 477GB of FFS.

Are there any plans to write a journaling filesystem for NetBSD? Wasabi has
one, but they aren't sharing it, so that's out of the question.

Basically, it boils down to: what do I have to do to get a filesystem that
can recover from a crash when >= half a terabyte is involved, without having
to wait 15-30 minutes for fsck? I am willing to pay for such a filesystem to
be developed, but only if it's made available to all NetBSD users, as I'm
sure I can't be the only one bothered by the time it takes to fsck a large
amount of disk space when a machine crashes.

Is anyone working on such a thing? FFS is great, and suits my purposes
perfectly, except when I have to recover from a crash. When I started using
NetBSD, I had perhaps 4GB of disk space to deal with, so it was a non-issue
then, but now, it's getting quite annoying.

Buying a filesystem from Wasabi is a joke unless it's provided in the form
of constantly-updated patches to -current. Linux has been providing decent
enough journaling filesystems for years now, why is NetBSD so far behind in
that arena?

-Sean