GSoC 2018: XFS support for Haiku

Blog post by abx1 on Wed, 2018-04-25 22:29
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Hello everyone! My name is Abhinand and I am really happy to say that I am one of the people who has been selected for GSoC 2018. And more importantly, I will be working on adding support for XFS. If you would like to ask something to me/track my progress, I have added the contact links at the bottom of this page.

I would like to begin with a short introduction about me and the work that I did so far. I am a computer science undergraduate student from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, in India. I am active member of FOSS@Amrita, an open source community in the college, through which I got to know about Haiku. I came across the project list in Haiku while I was searching for a project to do this summer. I got interested in two of the listed projects and starting writing proposal for the same. I started reading documents related to XFS, B+Tree, and Haiku file system modules and wrote a proposal with my understanding of the project. Afterwards, I was trying to explore the BFS codebase, as it uses B+Tree to store data. I came to know that BFS uses B+Tree to store data and this implementation can be used for XFS as well. Also, I was trying to understand how the file system uses Haiku file system modules and was able to get an idea of the classes needed for the file system.

Why XFS?

XFS is a high-performance journaling file system which was designed for large-scale storage systems. XFS file system can provide some of the following support:

  • Large, sparse files
  • Large file system
  • Many inodes
  • Large directories
  • Large allocations

XFS also employs a journaling log in which metadata changes are collected so that file system operations can be carried out automatically in the case of a crash. Furthermore, there is the concept of a real-time device wherein allocations are tracked more simply and in larger chunks to reduce uneasiness in allocation latency.

Tasks planned

  1. Explore current B+Tree implementation in BFS
  2. Identify various classes which can be used for XFS and understand it's working
  3. An empty file system module which can run using fs_shell and start implementing FS on top of this
  4. Use bonnie++ and XFS test suite for testing

Contact

  1. IRC: abx1_
  2. github: https://github.com/abhinand4858
  3. Trac: https://dev.haiku-os.org/search?q=before0ne


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