File Systems Reference Links

File Systems Comparison

File System Primer - Novell - Excellent
Comparison of File Systems - Wikipedia
File Systems of Operating Systems - Filesystems - Excellent
Comparing XFS, ReiserFS, and ext3 - by Daniel Robbins of Gentoo (2001) - IBM developerWorks
Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch - Debian Administration

Bench Marking File Systems

Benchmarking Filesystems Part I by Justin Piszcz - Linux Gazette
Benchmarking Filesystems Part II by Justin Piszcz - Linux Gazette

Future of File Systems

John Siracusa of Ars Technica's View - Very interesting

ZFS On Apple?s Leopard: Drops Of Fuel On The Embers - Foreword - August 25th, 2006 by Robin Harris, StorageMojo
Time Machine and the future of the file system - August 15, 2006, Fascinating - John Siracusa, Ars Technica
Who's minding the store? - November 20, 2005 - John Siracusa, Ars Technica
The case for RAID - November 05, 2005 - John Siracusa, Ars Technica

File Sharing

ntfs-3g for Linux

How to install ntfs-3g for Fedora Core 6? - Laci's packages for Fedora Core

NTFS for Linux

NTFS for Linux - SourceForge
Captive: The first free NTFS read/write filesystem for GNU/Linux - Jan Kratochvil Project
NTFS for Linux - Home Page

File Systems

FUSE - Filesystem in Userspace

FUSE (Linux) - Wikipedia
With FUSE it is possible to implement a fully functional filesystem in a userspace program - FUSE Homepage
FUSE makes it possible to implement a filesystem in a userspace program - FUSE Project page on SourceForge
FUSE Wiki

JFS File System

Under Construction

OpenGFS File System

OpenGFS - SourceForge

ReiserFS File System

Namesys (authors of ReiserFS)
ReiserFS v3 information (this is what most distros support during install time)
ReiserFS v4 information (next generation... has not been adopted into the main kernel yet)
Using ReiserFS (v4) with Linux - IBM developerWorks

Special File Systems

tmpfs - like a ramdisk, but different - IBM developerWorks
Journalling Flash File System version 2 (JFFS2) - Wikipedia

XFS File System

XFS: A high-performance journaling filesystem
Who's using XFS? Linux Distributions shipping XFS

ZFS File System

The *NIX DIstro page lists OpenSolaris based distros that should run ZFS native ^{Added 082307}
Adrian Cockcroft on Sun ZFS and Thumper (x4500) - August 06, 2006 ^{Added 082307}
ZFS: the last word in file systems
ZFS: OpenSolaris Community
100 Mirrored Filesystems in 5 minutes
ZFS Source Tour
General discussion about ZFS
ZFS on FUSE/Linux - Jeff Bonwick's Weblog
RAID-Z - Jeff Bonwick's Weblog
Coolest new storage product of the year: Sun's X4500
Jonathan gives us an early look at Thumper
Do-it-yourself X4500?
Home/SOHO NAS projects using ZFS - Eric Boutilier Weblog

ZFS File System Update ^{Added 082307}

Courtesy of:
Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>

I've actually done a survey of ZFS articles recently and I found a number that were very interesting:

For a detailed comparison of various different configurations specific to the Thumper, see
<http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/zfs_raid_recommendations_space_performance>.
I particularly like his calculations comparing the IOPs performance of a 73GB 2.5" Seagate Saviio SAS drive against a 750GB 3.5" Seagate Barracude SATA drive.

There's also a link to <http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/zfs_raid_recommendations_space_performance1> which has the "all-in" version of the charts.

Then, for the specific application of NFS on ZFS, I found the page at <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/nfs_zfs.html> which talks about using NFS on ZFS.

And the ZFS Best Practices wiki at <http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide> links to an interesting page at <http://blogs.sun.com/roch/category/ZFS> which has all sorts of other interesting stuff, which I believe includes a way of calculating how you should size your zpools and your RAID-Z groups to achieve a given IOPs rate.

The "ZFS and Database Recommendations" page in the ZFS Best Practices wiki also has some recent tips regarding the use of ztune for setting prefetches and concurrent I/O values. There's also a ZFS Storage Pools Recommendations section, which might be interesting. I also noted a mention of Sun StorageTek Availability Suite (AVS), which might or might not be useful in terms of volume replication, point-in-time snapshots, or even continuous data replication. Or, if you want to avoid AVS, you might be able to play around with ZFS send & receive, as Mark Round does at <http://www.markround.com/archives/38-ZFS-Replication.html#extended>.

Eric Kustarz has some interesting ZFS benchmarking & tuning tips on his page at <http://blogs.sun.com/erickustarz/category/ZFS>, including links to DTrace tools to help you look deeply into the ZFS code and see where it's spending all its time, and how you can look at and tune vq_max_pending, etc....

I also found an interesting page on Lustre, ZFS, and Linux at <http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/lustre-runs-zfs-on-linux/>.

Cluster File Systems - Under Construction

Cluster File Systems Presentation

Special Presentation. For the January meeting we will have a presentation by Dr. Dominique Heger from Fortuitous Technologies
in Austin on filesystems that can be used in clusters.
The following is his abstract of the talk:

Traditional, local file systems support a persistent name space. A local file system views devices as being locally attached,
the devices are not shared, and hence there is no need in the file system design to enforce device- sharing semantics. Instead,
the focus is on aggressively caching and aggregating file system operations to improve performance by economizing on the number
of actual disk accesses required for each file system operation. Newer networking technologies allow multiple machines (nodes)
to share storage devices. IBMs General Parallel File System (GPFS) or Red Hats Global File System are representing distributed
file system technologies that are taking a shared, network-attached storage approach. These file systems are built on the premise
that a shared disk file system has to exist within the context of a cluster infrastructure, and has to provide proper error handling
and recovery, as well as the best performance possible (performance, availability, and scalability features are key requirements).

The goal of this presentation is to elaborate on the terminology's surrounding the file systems that are being used in a Linux
cluster based environment. Some of the terms actually overlap, which may result in misconceptions and confusion on the user site,
an issue that is addressed in this talk. Further, this presentation discusses the classification of some the applications that may
be executed on a Linux cluster. To illustrate cluster file system technology, IBMs GPFS and Red Hats GFS file system are introduced
in more detail. The last part of the presentation briefly focuses on Sun Microsystems ZFS file system. While ZFS today is considered
a local file system solution, some of the features embedded in the design have the potential to revolutionize the file system industry.

File Systems Management

Grow/Shrink File Systems with LVM (table)

File System	Grow	Shrink	Comments
Growing, Shrinking File Systems with LVM^{Under Construction}
Logical volumes can be reduced in size as well as increased. However, it is very important to remember to reduce the size of the file system or whatever is residing in the volume before shrinking the volume itself, otherwise you risk losing data. Overview - http://satlug.jvpappas.net/ Extend (grow) - http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html Reduce (shrink) - http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/reducelv.html
ext2,3	Yes	Yes
ReiserFS, Reiser4	Yes	Yes
XFS	Yes	No	You can NOT make a XFS partition smaller online. The only way to shrink is to do a complete dump, mkfs and restore. An XFS filesystem may be enlarged by using xfs_growfs(8). If using partitions, you need to have free space after this partition to do so. Remove partition, recreate it larger with the exact same starting point. Run xfs_growfs to make the partition larger. Note - editing partition tables is a dangerous pastime, so back up your filesystem before doing so. Using XFS filesystems on top of a volume manager makes this a lot easier. [Source] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html
JFS	Yes	No
OpenGFS	Yes	No


NTFS
ZFS	Yes	Yes

File Systems Lower Metrics

File Formats

List of File Formats - Wikipedia

File Extensions

File Extensions - Filext.com
File Extensions - Webopedia

FAT (File Allocation Table)

File Allocation Table - Wikipedia

File System Hierarchy Standard

Filesystem Hierarchy Standard - Filesystem Hierarchy Standard Group

SCM-RCS-VCS

Git - Wikipedia
About Git - Wikipedia