- Q.
- With ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs (just to name a few),
who in their right mind would write another general-purpose
filesystem?
- A.
- Wrong question. They are all special purpose: Each has a
particular focus.
The goal of lafs is to provide optimal service for a different
special purpose: as a departmental file server. Specific
sub-goals include being friendly to:
- NFS - low latency writes
- backups - snapshots for on-line incremental backups
- quotas - tree based quotas
- admins - easy resize/migration, crash recovery
- RAID - stripe-wide writes. always.
- users - fast, reliable, stable, efficient, doesn't crash,
doesn't corrupt data, stable. Did I say reliable?
lafs (pronounced "laughs") is a log structured filesystem that is designed
to meet all these goals.
