Comments on: Book review: FreeBSD Essentials: Storage Mastery

By: Lazarus

Lazarus — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 20:38:49 +0000

Looking back as far as 2005, there seems to be no interest in porting GEOM to DF.

http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/kernel/2005-February/118421.html
(Start of a longish thread on the subject.)

IIRC DF has something similar / a little more generic, and implements Device Mapper (imported from NetBSDs reimplementation of the Linux driver. This import was done back in 2010.

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release28/
(Under kernel changes.)

By: Lars Schotte

Lars Schotte — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 08:33:47 +0000

What? GEOM is the best thing about FreeBSD, that’s far better than Linux has. At first it was a desaster, when they came up with it (I think around FreeBSD 6 or 7) but since FreeBSD 8 and 9 it is the best system for managing disks EVER!
What I also miss in other BSDs is that they lack ACLs. OpenBSD because of ideological reasons and others just do not implement it (yet). I’d love to see NFSv4 ACLs to HAMMER.
And just one more remark on disk setup, of course GEOM is good stuff, but the question here is, if that’s even relevant any more. I am not doing much lately, on Linux for example I just care about the right aligning of the partitions inside a GPT table (alignment in 1 MiB steps is fine for SSDs too) and then I put everything in one BTRFS (except one /boot and one swap of course) and do divide it up inside of it. To DragonFlyBSD I can imagine that one could do it in a similar way, just aligning the needed partitions and then put everything into one HAMMER and that’s it. On FreeBSD the same may go for ZFS. But ZFS still lacks some functionalities UFS2 has. It does not really lack them as a filesystem, but they are not implemented or supported on FreeBSD.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 22:15:54 +0000

Nobody took a serious look at it, as far as I know. Serious == code changes. It’d be a large project.

By: Javi

Javi — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 21:58:57 +0000

Awesome description. GEOM seems quite interesting. Was there ever an interest in bringing it into Dragonfly?