Tux3 Will Likely Soon Be Added To The Linux Kernel
Daniel Phillips, the long-time developer of Tux3 and other file-system technologies for Linux and current Samsung employee, had a very informal BoF session this morning at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa, California. It ended up just being me, Darrick Wong of Oracle, and Daniel for most of the session. Anyhow, the main takeaway from the session is that Tux3 should be mainlined very soon.
The Tux3 author intends to publish his Tux3 patches to the kernel mailing list in the next week or two with the intent of mainlining the file-system into the Linux kernel. There's still some features to add and bugs to work through, but Phillips is now at a stage where he's comfortable in seeing all of the code mainlined into the Linux kernel. He also hopes that by being in the mainline kernel will be an up-tick of interest and development support for the file-system. Samsung, among others, have been interested in potentially using Tux3 as an embedded Linux file-system. In fact, he said Samsung may be more interested in using Tux3 than their F2FS Flash-Friendly File-System project and he has been communicating with Samsung's F2FS developers.
The performance results shared by Tux3 say that the performance is on-par with EXT4 and XFS, with sometimes being even faster. In the past out of Tux3 we have seen bold performance claims so I'm very excited to test out the kernel as soon as it's been mainlined into the kernel.
Daniel says the Tux3 kernel code is around 18,000 lines of code right now and provides similar features and support to EXT3. Features like transparent file-system compression and snapshots were talked about, but there isn't yet any such features implemented. Daniel says he has a "cool approach" with a great algorithm he intends to implement for Tux3 snapshot capabilities.
While Daniel is currently running Tux3 and Tux3 development happens from within a Tux3 file-system, he says there will probably be about a three year hardening period for this file-system. Though he did say that Tux3 has already been "hardened more than some other file-systems", without disclosing the names of the other Linux FSes he believe are less hardened.
Stay tuned for the Tux3 review and merge proposal on the Linux kernel mailing list in the next week or two -- we'll cover it on Phoronix when it happens. More technical information on the file-system can be found at Tux3.org.
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