Thushan Fernando Uncut » Kernel / Internals

OpenIndiana Announced, the fork to Oracle’s OpenSolaris!

Thushan Fernando — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 11:55:57 +0000

Earlier today, we had the announcement for OpenIndiana. Aimed to be the de-facto OpenSolaris Distribution that tries to be binary and package compatible with Solaris 11 & Solaris 11 Express. Its apart Illumos Community with 20 core developers providing (eventually) a stable branch with 100% free & open source distribution.

Not only that, you can also download a ready baked OpenIndiana distribution (based on ou_147) or if you’re like me and still using OpenSolaris DEV snv_134, you can upgrade via the IPS management tools. Having said that though, I’m not going to rush and upgrade my zeus box anytime soon as it will take time to settle in, but you can take the baked ISO’s for a spin in a VM I have found a few references to OpenSolaris still there and there is currently no xVM Xen (dom0) support nor lx (Linux) branded zones. Not to worry, keep an eye out on the roadmap and release schedule for what they’re going to deliver.

You can get a copy of the OpenIndiana announcement presentation slides as well or follow @openIndiana on twitter. Otherwise, see the Getting Involved guide on the OpenIndiana Wiki and join in!

In a way, its good to know that the beloved OpenSolaris will still live – thanks to the community, but at the same time, how long that community will be turned on by developing and maintaining it will be interesting – though other forks of OpenSolaris are backing it (via Illumos) – like Nexenta and Schillix which has just released a version based on Ilumos. All in all, WATCH THIS PROJECT!

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Oracle releases VirtualBox 3.2

Thushan Fernando — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:41:47 +0000

With the Sun now set, Oracle has released VirtualBox 3.2 finally In particular some lovely optimisations for the newer Intel Core i5/i7 processors, Large Page support (which helps significantly on Windows x64 and Linux) as well as a very welcome optimisation on the networking in VirtualBox as well as multi-monitor support for Windows Guests. Whats more RDP sessions are now accelerated (VRDP).

Amongst the changes from the changelog:

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility

Experimental support for Mac OS X guests (see the manual for more information)

Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)

Page Fusion automatically de-duplicates RAM when running similar VMs thereby increasing capacity. Currently supported for Windows guests on 64-bit hosts (see the manual for more information)

CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)

New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)

Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running

Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI for Windows guests (see the manual for more information)

USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available (see the manual for more information).

LsiLogic SAS controller emulation (see the manual for more information)

RDP video acceleration (see the manual for more information)

NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage

Use of host I/O cache is now configurable (see the manual for more information)

Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system (replaces the automatic system presimparation feature; see the manual for more information)

Download from VirtualBox or get the Windows build. I’m really hoping the good Oracle keeps VirtualBox open, this is one kickass bit of kit.

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OpenSolaris FIX: Server refused to allocate pty (SSH)

Thushan Fernando — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:53:01 +0000

Just upgraded a friends OpenSolaris boxen to SNV_134 (latest available from the OpenSolaris dev repository) and after rebooting we realised we couldn’t SSH into it.

Server refused to allocate pty

DOH! This is caused by a known bug that has been around for a few builds now.

You’ll need to modify /etc/minor_perm and add the following to the bottom of the file.

clone:ptmx 0666 root sys

And what happens if your terminals don’t accept keyboard input? You could drop back into the shell *or* be lazy like me, find gText editor in your Accessories, add it to the panel and change the properties to run it as a privileged user:

pfexec gedit %U

Then run the file, open the /etc/minor_perm file, save and reboot. Make sure you change back the shortcut path

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VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 1 Released!

Thushan Fernando — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:37:16 +0000

Finally downloaded the latest 3.2.0 release of VirtualBox today and gave it ago!

From the forum post for this pre-release.

VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:

Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility.

Experimental support for Mac OS X guests

Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)

CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)

New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)

Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running

Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI (see the manual for more information)

USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available

LsiLogic SAS controller emulation

RDP video acceleration

NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage

Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system

OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

VMM: fixed crash with the OpenSUSE 11.3 milestone kernel during early boot (software virtualization only)

VMM: fixed OS/2 guest crash with nested paging enabled

VMM: fixed Windows 2000 guest crash when configured with a large amount of RAM (bug 5800)

VMM: fixed massive display performance loss (AMD-V with nested paging only)

Linux/Solaris guests: PAM module for automatic logons added

GUI: guess the OS type from the OS name when creating a new VM

GUI: added VM setting for passing the time in UTC instead of passing the local host time to the guest (bug 1310)

GUI: fixed seamless mode on secondary monitors (bugs 1322 and 1669)

GUI: added –seamless and –fullscreen command line switches (bug 4220)

Settings: be more robust when saving the XML settings files

Mac OS X: rewrite of the CoreAudio driver and added support for audio input (bug 5869)

Mac OS X: external VRDP authentication module support (bug 3106)

Mac OS X: Moved the realtime dock preview settings to the VM settings (no global option anymore). Use the dock menu to configure it.

Mac OS X: added the VM menu to the dock menu

3D support: fixed corrupted surface rendering (bug 5695)

3D support: fixed VM crashes when using ARB_IMAGING (bug 6014)

3D support: fixed assertion when guest applications uses several windows with single OpenGL context (bug 4598)

3D support: added GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object support

3D support: added OpenGL 2.1 support

3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (Mac OS X only) (bug 4653)

Added support for virtual high precision event timer (HPET)

LsiLogic: Fixed detection of hard disks attached to port 0 when using the drivers from LSI

NAT: fixed ICMP latency (non-Windows hosts only; bug 6427)

Keyboard/Mouse emulation: fixed handling of simultaneous mouse/keyboard events under certain circumstances (bug 5375)

Shared folders: fixed issue with copying read-only files (Linux guests only; bug 4890)

OVF: fixed mapping between two IDE channels in OVF and the one IDE controller in VirtualBox

Bootilicious! Download links are on the site (updated for BETA2).

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Multi-tasking in style on the Android Platform

Thushan Fernando — Sun, 02 May 2010 04:42:56 +0000

An interesting article posted on the Android Developer Blog from Dianne Hackborn (born to hack!) who discusses the way multi-tasking works on Android. Recommended reading as it goes beyond how it works (and why!) and offers some suggestions on how to make the most of it!

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The move to Android from WinMo and Android 2.2 (aka Froyo) coming soon!

Thushan Fernando — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:10:43 +0000

I switched from using Windows Mobile Phone devices to the Android platform a couple of months back with the Google Nexus One. With Microsoft following the lead of Apple in closing everything they’ve kept open for so long, there wasn’t much to look forward to with Windows Phone 7 (I was almost going to work on that team had I moved to the US a couple of years ago). Though, I’ve started writing for the new WP7 series via work, I’ve felt it was time to move on. Android is a breath of fresh air, I’ve toyed around with the G1 but the Nexus (whilst still a HTC device) is a joy to use as is the operating system. I actually have two Nexus’s these days, one is kept stock as my primary phone, whilst the other is using the Cyanogen mod.

Windows Mobile was never touch friendly – and rightfully so, as the operating system was written for stylus usage as a primary goal, then later HTC (via TouchFlo3D) bolted on a new UI to bring touch friendly UI candy for Windows Mobile. Though Windows Phone 7 brings this to the table (with touch being a primary design goal), I’m ashamed to say they’ve taken what WinMo was good for – being easy to customise and cook ROMs for and turned it to the Apple-esque closed ecosystem and Jobs likes being in control of his herd.

The great thing about the Android is that its got potential and its constant source of updates are very welcome (probably the fastest growth for a platform thus far!), the AppStore has increased exponentially the past few months (which is good and bad – useless app count increases) as users begin to crawl out of the rotting Apples and the stained Windows phones. Another key is that all your Google services are integrated nicely. I’ve given up most of my daily things to Google – email, calendar, contacts… They’re all “in the cloud” and (for now) synchronisable and safe (not that you couldn’t do this with the iPhone or Windows Mobile).

The next release of Android (2.2) is dubbed Froyo and brings some very funky new updates.

JIT Compiler

Probably the biggest addition in this release but first and foremost, the design and architecture of the Android platform is a bit different to others. Forgetting the native development paradigm for Android, you write applications utilising the Java language.

From the Android Developer Guide:

Android applications are written in the Java programming language. The compiled Java code — along with any data and resource files required by the application — is bundled by the aapt tool into an Android package, an archive file marked by an .apk suffix. This file is the vehicle for distributing the application and installing it on mobile devices; it’s the file users download to their devices. All the code in a single .apk file is considered to be one application.

In many ways, each Android application lives in its own world:

By default, every application runs in its own Linux process. Android starts the process when any of the application’s code needs to be executed, and shuts down the process when it’s no longer needed and system resources are required by other applications.

Each process has its own virtual machine (VM), so application code runs in isolation from the code of all other applications.

By default, each application is assigned a unique Linux user ID. Permissions are set so that the application’s files are visible only that user, only to the application itself — although there are ways to export them to other applications as well.

It’s possible to arrange for two applications to share the same user ID, in which case they will be able to see each other’s files. To conserve system resources, applications with the same ID can also arrange to run in the same Linux process, sharing the same VM.

In order to achieve this, the Android platform uses the Dalvik Virtual Machine (which is register based as opposed to the more common stack based machines) suited for embedded devices – low memory footprint, run multiple VMs by offloading the process isolation, memory, threading and IO management to the operating system (Android).

The caveat with the Dalvik VM is that the performance is not ideal (it has no JIT compiler) and (by the looks of it) needs to improve garbage collection process (fragmentation is a concern currently). If you’re keen on understanding more about the Dalvik VM, checkout a talk from 2008′s Google I/O about Davik VM Internals (1:01:34). They also realise the performance implications of the runtime.

However, back in November 2009, Bill Buzbee commited the Dalvik JIT code to the Android platform bringing JIT compilation which (if you’ve been using any of the CyanogenMod’s lately) makes a very noticeable and welcome performance boost to all applications.

The (trace-based JIT) compiler detects frequently executed traces (hot paths & loops) and emits optimised code for the platform as necessary, ensuring that minimal heap memory is utilised without the use of any persistence storage – which is what you want in an mobile device! Trace based JIT compilers are very common today, the TraceMonkey engine in Firefox is an example where dynamic languages (like Javascript) have had a boost through their use. Take a look at SPUR which is a Microsoft research project to bring trace-based JIT Compiler for CIL.

Whilst included in Android 2 it was never enabled, and by the looks of it, Android 2.2 will see this being enabled and stable

Linux Kernel update 2.6.32

The upgrade from 2.6.29 to 2.6.32 should bring a trimmed memory foot print and some performance tweaks as well as 802.11n support on devices such as the Google Nexus (yay!)

Flash 10.1 Support

There’s lots of hoo-haa about Flash support on iP*’s and other devices, I’m not too concerned about having it on my phone (less annoying ads browsing the interwebs) but it seems Google will bring Adobe Flash 10.1 support to Android. For some, it was a deal breaker when it came for choosing a phone. I guess now its a matter of ooh-ah!

Automatic application updates

Currently, updating Android applications is quite tedious – updating one application at a time, but it seems a newer update will automatically ensure that your applications are up to date – which is good and bad, I’d like to control when and where it decides to eat up my 3G data for updates (Eg. Update when on wireless)

Hopefully a rollback feature will also be implemented in case the newer versions break things.

Other updates

OpenGL ES 2.0 enhancements which game developers will find enticing.
The ability to control the color of the trackball (which currently flashes white)
Enabling of FM Radio
Fixes for resolution and “crazy screen” woes.

When will we be getting this? No-one knows, but suggestions are around the time for the Google I/O event on May 19th.

Next up, I’ll write about some of the applications that I’ve come to use daily, in the meantime you can see the apps running on my Android by checking my AppBrain account. Later some development articles on Android too

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VirtualBox 3.1 released!

Thushan Fernando — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:01:07 +0000

Just when you thought you can start a new month without some new software, Sun has blessed the world with a ray of VirtualBox 3.1 goodness on us all! All hail the Sun. I’ve been using the Betas and trying out the spanking awesome Teleportation feature in VirtualBox 3.1. So lets take a bit of a look at the new grub.

Beam me up Scotty!

You know, people say the catch phrase thinking its from Star Trek, but did you know that it was never actually mentioned in any episode?

Teleportation or ‘Live Migration‘ in Xen/KVM or vMotion in VMWare allows you to move a running virtual machine to another host without any downtime. Sun brings us this ‘Enterprise’ feature to VirtualBox. Whats even cooler, is that you can teleport your running VM on different host platforms (Windows -> OpenSolaris or Linux, vice versa) but not from one hardware set (Intel) to another (AMD) unless they both have the same instruction-sets. The transport layer for the teleportation is TCP/IP, so as long as the agreed port is open and accessible you can even teleport it through the tubes! (assuming you have a fast link like those pesky Dutch)

There are a few conditions and caveats as I’ve found. Firstly you must ensure (as you’d expect) the target VM has to have the exact same configuration as the source VM (same RAM, graphics memory, storage, CD/DVD images etc) the other thing is to be weary of the CPUs the host computer has. As long as its between the same generations (different clock speeds are OK) it should work (I tried between a QX6850 -> E6600 but QX6850->AMD X2 4600+ wasn’t so pretty!).

Once you’ve configured the target host to match the source host, time to ask VirtualBox to keep its eyes open for an incoming beam.

VBoxManage modifyvm [VirtualMachineName] --teleporter on --teleporterport [Port]

Then on the source host, send out the beams to initiate the teleportation:

VBoxManage controlvm [VirtualMachineName] teleport --host [TargetIP] --port [Port]

Give it some time to think and if you tried a localhost migration, it should migrate seamlessly

Scotty doesn’t know

Scotty doesn’t know about the other little changes, but you will. The new VirtualBox has lots of refinements in the UI. For one, new icons for all the Guest operating systems. The settings window has had a make over and includes ‘optimal settings’ detection.

Windows 2003 VM in VirtualBox 3.1

Here its telling me my Windows 2003 VM should have atleast 20Mb Video Memory assigned to it to work well in full-screen mode. Heading over to the Display options in VirtualBox 3.1 we find that the Video Memory selectors have got little indicators now, as well as the inclusion of 2D Video Acceleration.

Windows 2003 VM - VirtualBox 3.1 Display Settings

Depending how ever many cores you have, it will highlight what you should set as the maximum number of cores available for your VirtualMachine as well as the recommended RAM allocation. This is what I see in my Intel QX6850 development workstation.

VirtualBox 3.1 System Processor Settings

VirtualBox 3.1 - Motherboard Settings

VirtualBox now also has experimental support for Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) which will eventually replace the aging BIOS bootstrap (which is the default). Well known operating systems that boot via EFI include Windows Vista and Windows 7, Apple OS X and Fedora 11+.

The Storage controls in VirtualBox GUI has also had a bit of a make over. The options to select a disk and a controller have changed, CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller too now!

VirtualBox 3.1 - Storage

The networking settings GUI in the new VirtualBox has change too, not only that but you can now configure the network interfaces whilst the guest is running – YAY!

VirtualBox 3.1 Network Settings

Snapshots are a lot more flexible in this release (much like VMWare’s snapshot feature). Previously you can only restore from the last created snapshot, now any arbitrary snapshot can be restored too or branched off.

For those who use OpenSolaris (like yours truely!) the rewritten USB support (still experimental btw!) should mean we can interact with our USB devices in Solaris Nevada 124 or higher now – I’m running 127 and have USB devices appearing in my VMs.

If those don’t give you any indication on to the pure awesomeness of this release, there was a significant performance improvement for APE & AMD64 guests (VT-x/AMD-V) which will be quite noticeable from what I’ve been told by a college.

As Barack Obama said, tis time for a change..log.

He didn’t say that, I just reused 36 Mafia’s Lolli Lolli. The entire change log appears below from the website.

VirtualBox 3.1.0 (released 2009-11-30)

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)

VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (“branched snapshots”; see the manual for more information)

2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)

More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)

The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running

Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher

Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)

Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)

Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

VMM: guest SMP fixes for certain rare cases

GUI: snapshots include a screenshot

GUI: locked storage media can be unmounted by force

GUI: the a log window grabbed all key events from other GUI windows (bug #5291)

GUI: allow to disable USB filters (bug #5426)

GUI: improved memory slider in the VM settings

GUI: the VirtualBox website couldn’t be opened from the help menu (bug #4559)

3D support: major performance improvement in VBO processing

3D support: added GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array support

3D support: fixed crashes in FarCry, SecondLife, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Eve Online (bugs #2801, #2791)

3D support: fixed graphics corruption in World of Warcraft (#2816)

3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (#4653)

3D support: fixed incorrect rendering of non ARGB textures under compiz

iSCSI: support iSCSI targets with more than 2TiB capacity

VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash (bug #5424)

Network: fixed the E1000 emulation for QNX (and probably other) guests (bug #3206)

NAT: added host resolver DNS proxy (see the manual for more information)

VMDK: fixed incorrectly rejected big images split into 2G pieces (bug #5523, #2787)

VMDK: fixed compatibility issue with fixed or raw disk VMDK files (bug #2723)

VHD: fixed incompatibility with Hyper-V

Support for Parallels version 2 disk image (HDD) files; see the manual for more information

OVF: create manifest files on export and verify the content of an optional manifest file on import

OVF: fixed memory setting during import (bug #4188)

Mouse device: now five buttons are passed to the guest (bug #3773)

VBoxHeadless: fixed loss of saved state when VM fails to start

VBoxSDL: fixed crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)

X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)

Mac OS X hosts: don’t auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (bug #4866)

Mac OS X hosts (64 bit): don’t interpret mouse wheel events as left click (bug #5049)

Mac OS X hosts: fixed a VM abort during shutdown under certain conditions

Solaris hosts: combined the kernel interface package into the VirtualBox main package

Solaris hosts: support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture (with OSS audio backend).

Shared folders: VBOXSVR is visible in Network folder (Windows guests, bug #4842)

Shared folders: performance improvements (Windows guests, bug #1728)

Windows, Linux and Solaris Additions: added balloon tip notifier if VirtualBox host version was updated and Additions are out of date

Solaris guests: fixed keyboard emulation (bug #1589)

Solaris Additions: fixed as_pagelock() failed errors affecting guest properties (bug #5337)

Windows Additions: added automatic logon support for Windows Vista and Windows 7

Windows Additions: improved file version lookup for guest OS information

Windows Additions: fixed runtime OS detection on Windows 7 for session information

Windows Additions: fixed crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)

Linux Additions: added support for uninstalling the Linux Guest Additions (bug #4039)

Linux guest shared folders: allow mounting a shared folder if a file of the same name as the folder exists in the current directory (bug #928)

SDK: added object-oriented web service bindings for PHP5

Overall this is a solid new release from Sun – unsure about its stability as I’ve only been running a few VMs (Windows 2003, CentOS and Fedora 12) for about 10-12hrs. Nothing bad as yet.

Download from the VirtualBox site:

VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Windows hosts x86/amd64

VirtualBox 3.1.0 for OS X hosts Intel Macs

VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Linux hosts

VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts x86/amd64

Enjoy!

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Google releases ChromeOS

Thushan Fernando — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:12:29 +0000

Google just released information and a presentation (below) about ChromeOS.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QRO3gKj3qw

Wow, you can take a peek at the source as well. I’m not sure if its just a very tweaked minimalistic Linux Kernel with a Chrome Window Manager or what, but like they did with Chrome, this is definitely a Think Different product. Take a look at a visual tour of the ChromeOS.

I don’t think this will replace your traditional desktop completely (I still like to have my stuff with me rather than hosted somewhere!) but what happens to devices, peripherals etc, development environments (Imagine running Visual Studio over the intertubes on ADSL!) etc.

But one things for sure, it takes the idea of Operating Systems and how you view your operating system to a different level. All those tabs you see in Chrome now, are virtual desktop like instances in ChromeOS. More info can be got from the PCWorld article on ChromeOS.

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Windows 7 NetBIOS Kernel Crash, 1997 all over again :(

Thushan Fernando — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:50:12 +0000

Looks like Windows 7 is vulnerable to an SMB remote exploit.

Unfortunatly this SMB2 security issue is specificaly due to a MS patch, for another SMB2.0 security issue:
KB942624 (MS07-063)
Installing only this specific update on Vista SP0 create the following issue:

SRV2.SYS fails to handle malformed SMB headers for the NEGOTIATE PROTOCOL REQUEST functionnality.
The NEGOTIATE PROTOCOL REQUEST is the first SMB query a client send to a SMB server, and it’s used to identify the SMB dialect that will be used for futher communication.

Reminds me of the days of WinNuke.

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Next generation Linux file-systems

Thushan Fernando — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:24:17 +0000

If you’ve been reading this blog a couple of things are clear, I don’t like Apple much and I have a soft spot for file-systems. An article was posted on the IBM DeveloperWorks site that covers two file systems; NiLFS(2) and exofs that has some great information about these two beasts.

Linux® continues to innovate in the area of file systems. It supports the largest variety of file systems of any operating system. It also provides cutting-edge file system technology. Two new file systems that are making their way into Linux include the NiLFS(2) log-structured file system and the exofs object-based storage system. Discover the purpose behind these two new file systems and the advantages that they bring.

Read the full article on the Next-generation linux filesystems, there was an article on LWN.net a few years back discussing the (then emerging) Btrfs and NiLFS and how things may pan out. I’m quite happy and content with ZFS but in either case it’ll be interesting to see how all three go.

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