On Sun, 2012-08-19 at 12:14 +0200, Marco Stornelli wrote:what are pros and cons of this fsPros:
compared with existing fs?
- Simplicity. LanyFS avoids any unnecessary complexity.
Example: I had a lot of problems reading and writing data on the Arduino
platform. Most of it was, because the platform wasn't capable of dealing
with FAT32 when files grew. I don't know if LanyFS performs better on
Arduino, I haven't written a driver for Arduino yet, I am glad I managed
to get it working on Linux for the moment.
- Interoperability. LanyFS was designed to unite those features which
are common on most operating systems. [...] All information, including
file and directory metadata, is stored in the most purposive format
without honoring the habits of any particular operating system.
Example: I have a nice FullHD movie file which is about 8GB in size. I
wanted to play that video file on a RaspberryPI connected to a TV. FAT32
wasn't able to store the file because it was larger than 4GB. I then
tried using ext3, but the ownership information from my workstation
(were the file was copied from) did not match the ones the RaspberryPI
had, since I usually do not synchronize user profiles between
workstations and embedded devices. There are workarounds, one might say,
but shouldn't it be much more easier to transfer files from one device
to another? There are use cases were modes/permissions and ownership of
files does not matter, where quota and accounting isn't necessary, where
access times don't need to be stored since they would never get updated
anyway.
Flexibility. LanyFS adopts to the underlying storage device by
adjusting its parameters accordingly. It can address block
devices starting from 4 KiB up to 64 ZiB with minimal overhead by
parameterizing the filesystem at formatting time.
Example: At the university we sometimes work with smart cards and their
sometimes "strange" filesystems. I am not an expert on smart cards and
stuff like that, but I was being told that a more simple filesystem
would be welcome. AFAIK we are talking about "disks" with a size of less
than 1MB. I don't think this is a big feature, most other fs can be
adjusted to perfectly fit a particular purpose, too. Yet there still is
the demand for something "much more simpler".
Cons:
- LanyFS is featureless. It lacks of features. This is considered a
feature by some people, and a big con by others :)
- Use of recursion. It may not scale in some cases (e.g. very large
files on embedded platforms).
- Current restrictions due to early stage. Max blocksize is 4k, but 4MB
might be better. The LWN article pointed to by Alan talks about this.