Random Musings

Listening to a talk about Ext3 is going to be improved in the future - it seems that we’ve reached a plateau of the easy and obvious big fixes having occurred, and the next-gen Ext3 changes will hurt.

Extent based allocations (use logical block, physical block, length as a single 64-bit record, instead of older, more granular formats) require file system layout changes, so they will not happen right away. Other changes related to on-disk format changes will most likely sneak in when the extent based allocations happen.

These changes will probably not cause a rename to Ext4 - the system of capability flags means that you will just pick the features your filesystem needs and create it. Older kernel that understand the right flags or that have all the features that are flagged as “incompatible” for backwards functionality, will be able to mount the filesystem and use it (perhaps read-ony), but the compatibility will be rather complicated.

My tentative plans for talks today (after I sleep) are:
nfsim: untested code is buggy code (Netfilter test suite)
Trusted Computing and Linux (Sorry, overslept)
State of Ext3 — see the next entry.

eCryptFS - encrypted filesystem
This is something akin to “unionfs” - it overlays an already mounted directory and provides automatic encryption of the files in it, based upon a set of policies. This is kind of neat, but not really quite ready yet.

Clusterproc (clusterwide process management) or kdump/kexec

Then, BOF sessions:
NFSv4
iSCSI or Security
Spamikaze