FreeBSD Lands Support For 64-bit Inodes (ino64 Project)

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD Lands Support For 64-bit Inodes (ino64 Project)

This week FreeBSD has finally merged the fruits of the ino64 project: 64-bit inodes support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-64-bit-Inodes-ino64

[ldo17]

Nice to see them making the effort of offering credible competition to Linux...

[aht0]

It's been technically possible for ages and was considered more than decade a go. Idea was rejected due to huge ABI breakage which it would have caused. These days, majority are using ZFS and change like this is less destructive.
You are forced to use UFS only if your hardware does not 'know' GPT. ZFS boot code does not fit into MBR boot sector so you'd be using UFS.

'Competition to Linux' only if you'd be comparing UFS against Ext3/4.
With ZFS FreeBSD has nothing to compete against. BtrFS is still unfinished, has some 'future-proof' design limitations, kinda like UFS now had fixed. ZFS on Linux is feature limited/restricted
-lack of NFSv4 ACLs
-no delegation of privileges possible
-lack of per-dataset user permissions
-it gets funky when disks have fault.
-no transparent NFS exporting. FS tools getting 'stuck'
-refuses to mount datasets in 'old' mount points sometimes.. And so forth. Typical "sort of works mostly"..

[ldo17]

You are forced to use UFS only if your hardware does not 'know' GPT.

In the Linux world, partition format and filesystem format are two entirely separate things. Thus, in x86, your choice of MBR versus GPT is separate from what filesystems you want to put on those partitions. You can even dispense with a partition table, and format the entire disk as a filesystem.

And those same filesystems work on non-x86, where the traditional partition formats are quite different.

[aht0]

What OS itself could recognize is yet meaningless. FreeBSD partition scheme support btw


But the point is, if hardware does not find recognizable boot sector from it's disk, you'd get "missing operating system" message. And pre-EFI machines do not have capability in hardware to recognize GPT formatted disks.

MBR boot sector is limited to 512 bytes, which is not enough for ZFS boot code, so ZFS can't be loaded. It used to work but code seems to get bigger by years. Even GRUB boot loader does not seem to work no more for ZFS/MBR. At least on BSD. I dont have a clue if it would work on Linux these days, nor care. Linux ZFS support is that much more insecure and poorer, I cant see the point in testing.