The Moose File-System Remains Tasty

The Moose File-System was updated in March with new features and capabilities.

One of the less common Linux file-systems I've been meaning to write about in a quick weekend article on Phoronix since last month has been the Moose File-System. In March was the release of MooseFS 1.6.24 (the announcement) that ups the file-size limit from 2TiB to 128PiB, a test command, simple net topology support, a symlink cache on the client side, and various changes and other work.

MooseFS is self-described as "a fault tolerant, network distributed file system. It spreads data over several physical servers which are visible to the user as one resource." The Moose File-System supports a hierarchical structure, POSIX file attributes, special files (pipes, sockets, block/character devices, etc), symbolic linksm and access to the file-system based upon the IP address and/or password.

The advertised special features for this project is its high reliability (multiple copies of data can be stored physically across separate computers), capacity is dynamically expandable, deleted files are retained for a configurable amount of time, and coherent snapshots of files. Those wishing to learn more can do so at MooseFS.org.

The road-map for the project indicates MooseFS 1.7 arriving in 2012. Expected features include the ability yo set quota to folders, allowing the trash support to provide directory structure, support for POSIX locks, and an alternative mode for keeping data for archival purposes. There's also more MooseFS 1.6.x point releases planned for the coming months.