How file system agnostic could unRAID be ?

[orb]

I guess the real question here is how does md and file systems interact and what does it take to use other file systems.

 

[Joe L.]

I guess the real question here is how does md and file systems interact and what does it take to use other file systems.

 

The "md" drive probably does not care about what kind of file-system is on the /dev disks.  To it, it is just blocks of data.

 

The unRaid management utility however thinks that any file-system that fails to mount as a reiserfs is "unformatted"  So, as part of the start up of unRaid, the management utility creates /mnt/disk1, /mnt/disk2, etc mount points and then attempts to mount using a type of reiserfs each of the data file systems.

 

It would take a smarter management utility to be able to use other file systems.  Basically, Tom could just have a second drop-down per disk on the devices page to select the file-system type.  Then, ext2, ext3, ntfs-3g would all be possible once the appropriate associated processes are ironed out.

 

The associated processes include formatting a new file system of the desired type AND expanding the existing file-system to the size of a new replacement drive while the data is in place.  The reiserfs can be expanded, not sure of the others.  This is an important need, otherwise, replacement drives would end up with an exact copy of the failed drive, and exactly the same partition sizes as the original, even if much bigger.

 

The feature request "laundry list" has on it :- support additional file systems such as XFS, NTFS

 

There is hope... not sure how high it is in priority, I think NFS support is higher.

 

Joe L.

[NLS]

It should be really low in priority, indeed there are much more important things to implement.

 

Implementing this would also mean making/building also FS agnostic (or multiple FS supporting) tools for resolving problems and as already mentioned, how to take care of expansion for different FS.

In the end though, the idea of building the parity is just bringing down all FS to the binary digit.

 

As a side note (read: small talk), implementing this would be implementing my original idea of a "high-layer" FS that doesn't care about underlying FS. I thought about this a couple of years ago (didn't know about unRAID), but I probably should put quotes in "original" as because of unRAID it is clear my idea was not original hehehe (even though I didn't know about unRAID).