Re: Support for XFS in FreeBSD?

Eivind Hestnes wrote:
> Is XFS ported to FreeBSD? If not, what's the status?

[ Let's assume this isn't the usual XFS troll.  Here is all the
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  take this at face value, and are unwilling to read the mailing
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--

It is not ported.

Some people have tried to start a porting project in the past,
but that project has so far failed to produce anything, even a
simple port of the "newfs" program.

There are no new plans to port it of which I'm aware, unless this
is your way of volunteering to do the work.  The best way to do
that isn't to volunteer on this mailing list: it's to do the work
and show up and say "Here!  I've done the work".

Most people who are involved in FreeBSD instead of Linux for the
philosophical reason of software license, and could easily do the
work, will not touch the code because it is under the GPL.

This includes me; I personally believe a port would be rather
trivial, "meaning mostly work which does not require deep thinking",
but I will not do the work for anything less than a substantial
amount of money and a legal indemnification.

Most of us are additionally uninterested because it does not
include the cluster support in the released sources, which is
what makes XFS academically interesting, compared to any other
journalled FS.

You should feel free to do the port, and come back to us when it
is complete and working.

The project has stated in the past that it would be happy to
take a completed port and place it under /usr/src/sys/gnu or
/usr/ports.

If a port is completed, it will never be the default root FS,
since that would require rewriting it to get it out from under
the license, or at least rewriting enough of it for the boot
loader to have read-only access to it enough to load the XFS
driver as a module.  Clause 6 of the GPL forbids including it
compiled into a FreeBSD distribution kernel binary without a
change to the FreeBSD license, which we cannot legally change.

Note: SCO is suing people who have touched Linux code with code
from commercial OS's derived from System V.  SGI's IRIX, from
which XFS comes, is derived from System V, so there is some legal
risk involved to anyone doing a port: SCO may sue you, too.  I
don't know if this effects the projects previous statements.

-- Terry