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Is this Bad News for MSFT at the next shootout?
Can anyone tell me what this will mean in the next round? My impression was that the Linux file system really hurt Linux. Am I correct in understanding that this will change that completely?
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File System Based on Radical New Technology Released For Linux Today
Jun 29th, 17:59:23
A revolutionary new approach to file system design based on storing
everything in a single unified tree was released today.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: (San Francisco) -- Namesys released Reiserfs for
Gnu/Linux today. It is a revolutionary new approach to file system
design which stores not just filenames but the files themselves in a
B*-tree. It is a generation ahead of alternatives which use older plain
B-tree technology, and cannot store the files themselves in the tree.
Reiserfs doesn't suffer from log congestion either, you can effectively
use it for quickly creating a 100,000 entry directory, and it is fairly
unique in that. Namesys has Ecila, a french internet search engine
company, as its primary customer, and they are basing their search
engine on the file system, with plans for using reiserfs to create
30,000,000 entry directories of keywords. Reiserfs is GPL'd, with
exceptions to the GPL available for sale. You can get a free copy of
Reiserfs at their website.
The president of Namesys explains the benefits:
''This new technology creates the long dreamed of technical foundation
for adding database and keyword indexing features to the filesystem.
That will dramatically lowers the cost of programming for Gnu/Linux by
eliminating the need to endlessly re-invent storage management
techniques for each application program. At the same time, it makes
traditional file system usage go much faster. Reiserfs shipped this
week. Even though our competitor's designs are now obsolete, they can't
afford to just throw away all of their code and redesign from scratch
like they have to to compete. Throw on top of that that they are just
now starting porting to Linux where all the growth in market share is
going, and it really puts them in a bad spot. We designed for Linux from
day one.
''You can see the advantages for traditional file system usage in this
dbench benchmark. Dbench simulates the file system load created by Samba
servers. Note the 32-68% performance advantage for when the benchmark
fits into cache (10 or 40 clients in the chart below) the way Microsoft
likes to do the benchmark when it compares itself to Linux. We think
this will really help Linux beat Microsoft at the Mindcraft benchmark.
It will just get better over time, too. Every week we improve our
benchmarks by another 5%. Since the technology is new, and hasn't
reached its limit like the older matured file system technologies, with
every week the gap between us and them is going to grow wider. For large
directories, the performance gain becomes order of magnitude or more.''
Dbench: Reiserfs vs. Ext2
Benchmark description: Dbench is an emulation of the Netbench benchmark
that is used in the press to rate windows fileservers like Samba and
WindowsNT. The full description of dbench can be found at:
ftp://samba.org/pub/tridge/dbench/
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