XFS Status Updates

XFS status update for September 2008

With Linux 2.6.27 still not released but only making slow progress from 2.6.27-rc5 to 2.6.27-rc8 XFS changes in mainline have been minimal in September with only about half a dozen bug fixes patches.

In the meantime the generic btree patch set has been committed to the development tree, but not many other updates yet. On the user space side xfsprogs 2.10.1 has been released on September 5th with a number of important bug fixes. Following the release of xfsprogs 2.10.1 open season for development of the user space code has started. The first full update of the shared kernel / user space code in libxfs since 2005 has been committed. In addition to that the number of headers installed for the regular devel package has been reduced to the required minimum and support for checking the source code for endianess errors using sparse has been added.

The patch sets to unify the XFS and Linux inode structures, and rewrite various bits of the sync code have seen various iterations on the XFS list, but haven't been committed yet. A first set of patches implementing CRCs for various metadata structures has been posted to the list.

XFS status update for August 2008

With the 2.6.27-rc5 release the 2.6.27 cycle is nearing it's end. The major XFS feature in 2.6.27-rc5 is support for case-insensitive file names. At this point it is still limited to 7bit ASCII file names, with updates for utf8 file names expected to follow later. In addition to that 2.6.27-rc5 fixes a long-standing problem with non-EABI arm compiler which pack some XFS data structures wrongly. Besides this 2.6.27-rc5 also contains various cleanups, most notably the removal of the last bhv_vnode_t instances, and most uses of semaphores. As usual the diffstat for XFS from 2.6.26 to 2.6.26-rc5 is negative:

      100 files changed, 3819 insertions(+), 4409 deletions(-)

On the user space front a new minor xfsprogs version is about to be released containing various fixes including the user space part of arm packing fix.

Work in progress on the XFS mailing list are a large patch set to unify the alloc, inobt and bmap btree implementation into a single that supports arbitrarily pluggable key and record formats. These btree changes are the first major preparation for adding CRC checks to all metadata structures in XFS, and an even larger patch set to unify the XFS and Linux inode structures, and perform all inode write back from the btree uses instead of an inode cache in XFS.