Good news on the filesystem front! The XFS filesystem has been merged into the main 2.4 kernel this morning by Marcelo Tosatti (the 2.4 kernel maintaner).
I’ve been using XFS for just over three years and can’t say enough good things about it. I’ve been working on a patch over the last few months for the 2.6 kernel for a hardware specific XFS bug that causes it to crash on a particular Dual AMD motherboard. Getting a major chunk of code into the Linux kernel is a pretty big deal, especially when you consider that many of the main kernel developers don’t care much for XFS (whether thats because they develop their own competing filesystem (ext3, reiserfs, jfs) or because they still think of XFS as an archaic Irix filesystem) and there are a few XFS hooks into the VM of the linux kernel.
This is kind of a big deal because future stable 2.4 kernel releases will come with XFS ‘out of the box’ meaning device developers (for one) will be able to incorporate the features XFS brings to the table into their products and not have to worry about maintaing their own seperate kernel branch where XFS is included. This move also makes a lot of sense because XFS is already in the 2.6 kernel tree.
So thanks to all the folks who work on XFS for bringing a great filesystem into the mainstream!
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and son Carter.
