Linux.conf.au 2003 | Abstracts

Who wants another filesystem

Neil Brown

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Q. With ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs (just to name a few), who in their right mind would write another general-purpose filesystem?
A. Wrong question. They are all special purpose.

The goal of lafs is to provide optimal service as a departmental file server. Specific sub-goals include being friendly to:

  • NFS - low latency writes
  • backups - snapshots for on-line incremental backups
  • quotas - tree based quotas
  • admins - easy resize/migration, crash recovery
  • RAID - stripe-wide writes. always.
  • users - fast, reliable, stable, efficient, doesn't crash, doesn't corrupt data, stable. Did I say reliable?

lafs (pronounced "laughs") is a log structured filesystem that is designed to meet all these goals.

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