HP releases AdvFS under GPL-2

[Ric Werme]

Coleman Kane wrote:
>On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 13:48 -0400, Bill McGonigle wrote:
>> If so, it might be handy since ZFS isn't coming to Linux any time  
>> soon, AFAICT, and some apps react poorly to NFS.  Would it be too  
>> cynical to suspect that HP simply doesn't want to maintain it anymore  
>> but has customers who like it?

>I would imagine that your last paragraph is pretty close to the truth.
>Facing the possibility of either losing all AdvFS clients to other
>systems (Solaris or Linux), they made the play to put it out under the
>GPL.

A number of HP customers with Tru64 systems were waiting for HP to
put AdvFS and cluster support into HP-UX.  I doubt they were very pleased
with HP's decision to can the project.  HP also canned most of the people.
I suspect several customers moved into the "We'll run Tru64 as long as the
machine still boots" camp after that.

It may well be that HP is doing this to try to keep some of that customer
base.  HP-UX has not done too well lately, AFAIK, so perhaps they're paying
more attention to their big system customers.

>Maybe it is indicative of a larger play by HP into the Linux ring?

Perhaps.  HP-UX has some Veritas file system code, they can't put that
into Linux, so AdvFS is certainly the best choice for that.

While I worked on NFS within Tru64, I always appreciated UFS.  Small,
fast (especially with Prestoserve battery-backed RAM card for metadata),
very good locality and often would take a memory-mapped file that was
written randomly and leave a contiguous file behind.  That's how
the linker wrote a.out files, so it was a useful feature.

The standard UFS drawbacks of large directories (don't do that) and waiting
for fsck (Tru64 has very good uptime) were not that big a deal to me. UFS
got along with NFS a lot better than AdvFS did.

Big customers like AdvFS appreciated the multi-volume support (heck, TOPS-10
did that in 1970), snapshots, and resizing.

It will be interesting to see what happens.  When HP decided I was no longer
necessary (too few NFS bug reports, did my job too well?) there were only a
few people with AdvFS skills left.

    -Ric Werme