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Well…at the risk of jumping into something here: “would SGI be okay with that”: keep in mind this a community project. There are contributors to XFS here at SGI. There is also a lot of work done by employees of Redhat as well as other companies (and a few freelance
/ people interested regardless of current position). Anyhow, just a quibble to note that it’s not a question of what SGI dictates. Although I will note that I’ve actually raised the idea of XFS on Windows internally (here at SGI) and while it’s not a priority
I would say there’s at least some interest. At the least, if you build it, we’ll certainly take a look at it.
J I saw an email a while back on this list that implied someone was trying to work on that iirc; I didn’t see any follow-up from it. There are also some projects that look abandoned which tried to do this I recall
from previous searches on this. One of the suggestions I heard when I was considering this was to look at how the ext port on Windows works. That looks mildly inactive itself but should be good for comparison. Internally, SGI has a proprietary system, CXFS, which does clustered XFS including Windows as client nodes. So we’ve got code that actually does XFS data writes from Windows nodes. Of course, the tricky bit is
managing all of the metadata/logging, which isn’t touched from Windows in that system, but it’s just another tidbit to note “yes, this type of system should be possible”. As far as licensing, I’m certainly no expert, but AFAIK it should be possible to use the same GPL license as you note and make an open-source Windows driver for this using as much of the current XFS code as is
convenient. There are nuances in the license though. I can try to find the article if you’re interested: I read a post previously by someone who had developed a GPL driver on Windows and was noting concerns about linking against closed source libraries
(essentially decided it was okay because it (a) could be considered a system library and (b) they were starting a fresh project so they could add extra exemptions specifically allowing that). I am a novice at XFS and, frankly, at Windows kernel device development as well. But I’m certainly interested in seeing a GPL XFS-on-Windows developed at some point. If you go ahead with this, I’d definitely
appreciate any information and would be glad to assist in any way I can. And myself personally, I’d absolutely appreciate someone else taking the lead on this, because with other issues I’m working on, I would be unlikely to put serious solo effort into this
anytime soon. Cheers, -Shaun Gosse CXFS Windows SGI From: xfs-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xfs-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Yuji Saeki Congratulations on your file system, it’s quite nice. I’ve benchmarked it myself, it’s very impressive. I’m curious though, is there are thought to a Windows driver? If someone ported the most current-stable version to Windows (free) under
the same license ‘GNU Lesser General Public License’ with entire credit to XFS, would SGI be okay with that? A ‘no-warranty implied’ (etc) kind of protection of course. Quite a few devs that I work with enjoy the XFS filesystem and we dev in both Linux and
Windows. We’re very interested in making this happen with respect to the XFS project. |
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