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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by lewq on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @09:07AM (#7063373)
Happy to take any questions :-)
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by jeffreyparker on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @09:40AM (#7063546)
As a very happy ZFS on FreeBSD user, thank you for all of your work!
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by lewq on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @10:39AM (#7063881)
On behalf of Andriy and the rest of the FreeBSD/ZFS community, you're welcome! :)
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by olavgg on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @11:08AM (#7064112)
I'm also a very happy ZFS user on FreeBSD. I've tried to use it in a lot of crazy ways. At the moment I'm researching if ZFS and a virtual machine running Microsoft SQL Server can improve query performance(with LZ4/GZIP compression) and improve the backup speed.

Though I'm wondering about if there are any plans to add XZ compression? Or faster hashing with Siphash24 for data checksums?

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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by Scaevolus on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @11:44AM (#7064315)
LZMA compression (used in the xz format) is much slower than the disk interface and uses a lot of memory, so it would reduce performance.
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by patrickg_zill on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @06:46PM (#7067075)
Improving the backup speed should be as easy as quiescing the database, taking a ZFS snapshot after you are sure everything is written to disk, then backing up that snapshot.
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by andyjpb on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @10:26AM (#7063788)
Have you read the VFS Chapter in Beautiful Code?
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by agapon on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @12:06PM (#7064458)
Thank you for pointing out that book!

It looks like it has a very good description of how C and generated code are used for object-oriented implemetation of VFS. Plain C is not immediately useful for object-oriented programming.

The goal of my blog post series is to describe how VFS works on a higher level.

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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by lewq on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @10:56AM (#7064020)
Not yet! :)
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by kieransimkin on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @09:43AM (#7063555)
Interesting to see some technical details of FreeBSD's VFS layer, I've never delved too deeply into it myself but I have looked at Linux's so it's not completely unfamiliar to me.
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by agapon on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @12:07PM (#7064473)
I haven't had a chance yet to examine Linux VFS in details, so at the moment I can only talk about Solaris and FreeBSD ones.
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by jfb on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @10:52AM (#7063993)
This was very interesting, thanks. Sorta-OT, I wonder if there's a modern equivalent of Vahalia's Unix Internals: The New Frontiers [1]?

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337378.UNIX_Internals

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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by agapon on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @12:01PM (#7064427)
Not exactly the same thing but I found the following books quite useful for understanding how a lot of kernle code works: - The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System - Solaris Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture

Still, nothing beats reading the source code :-)

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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by angersock on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @12:14PM (#7064526)
The article mentions illumos--has anybody got any experiences to share with using that instead of BSD or nix?
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Re:Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example by doughj3 on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @11:19PM (#7068066)
Illumos is nix. Per wikipedia, "Illumos is a free and open-source Unix operating system. It derives from OpenSolaris, which in turn derives from UNIX System V R4 and Berkeley Software Distribution. "

When Oracle killed off OpenSolaris, Illumos came about.

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