Cyrus on Solaris at universities?

[Rob Mueller]

> I do have one ZFS machine, and I don't use it to anywhere near its
> capabilities - it's just backups.

ZFS really did raise the bar on file systems by a big jump, and it's created 
a new level of expectation.

For ages we lived with non-journaled file systems and then when we went to 
journaled it was "how did we ever live without this?". Still, corruption 
does sometimes happens, and fscking is still a pain. On top of that, there's 
undetected corruption that can and does occur as well.

Now with ZFS having COW + checksums, the integrity level has been raised 
again and it's the same again, "how did we ever live without this?"

I'm really hoping that BTRFS fills this filesystem hole that needs to be 
filled in linux (http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/). The good points are 
that Chris Mason has a lot of experience with file systems, so it seems he's 
been able to gather together all the main concepts and issues in his head to 
develop this new one, including the performance implications of decisions. 
He's also got a reasonably aggressive sort of timeframe for a filesystem as 
well (http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/dist/documentation/todo.html).

The one thing that seems to be missing to me is a big test suite. I notice 
that ZFS advertise the fact that they have a comprehensive set of tests that 
includes trying to break the filesystem in many nasty ways. I think that's a 
great idea, and something that should be included as well.

I guess time will tell.

Rob