I'm friends with some of the original ZFS guys, Jeff Bonwick was a student of mine at Stanford and I got him to come to Sun, Bill Moore worked for me on BitKeep

I'm friends with some of the original ZFS guys, Jeff Bonwick was a student of mine at Stanford and I got him to come to Sun, Bill Moore worked for me on BitKeeper. Those guys are seriously studly engineers. I've done file system work at Sun, I don't compare with Bill & Jeff, they are way better. So yeah, trying to do better than those guys is going to be interesting. I'd like to know who is on the RedHat team working on this new file system, just the fact that they are trying is interesting. Edit: and I was at SGI when XFS was pretty new, I know some of the XFS folks as well, Adam Sweeney and Mike Nishimoto. I was the guy that plugged XFS into NFS over HIPPI, so I have more than a passing knowledge of it: http://mcvoy.com/lm/bds.pdf http://mcvoy.com/lm/bds.pdf XFS was pretty cool but a lot of the technology that made it fast was XLV, the logical volume manager. XFS just made sure it handed very large, aligned, I/O requests to the volume manager, the volume manager was the layer that split them up and got all the DMA engines going. That's how we did 500MB/sec in the early 1990's on 200mhz MIPS chips, the MIPS chips weren't touching the data, the DMA engines were (the networking stack did page flipping to avoid bcopies). I know XFS did other stuff for scaling but it most certainly did not do all the safety stuff (and I don't think it did transparent compression, those 200mhz MIPS cpus weren't fast enough to put that in there) that ZFS does. So I'm wondering how much XFS has evolved from the SGI days. If it hasn't, I don't get why RedHat started there. Be really interested to know the back story.