Crash-Safe & Copy-On-Write GEFS As The "Good Enough File-System" For OpenBSD

Ori Bernstein announced an early preview of his Good Enough File-System "GEFS" for OpenBSD. GEFS is a crash-safe, snapshotting, copy-on-write file-system that he wrote initially for 9front and now porting to OpenBSD.

Ori describes the original GEFFS design in this technical whitepaper (PDF). He summarizes GEFS as:

"GEFS is a new file system built for Plan 9. It aims to be a crash-safe, corruption-detecting, simple, and fast snapshotting file system, in that order. GEFS achieves these goals by building a traditional 9p file system interface on top of a forest of copy-on-write Bµ trees. It doesn't try to be optimal on all axes, but good enough for daily use."

The OpenBSD port isn't yet ready for production and isn't yet being submitted for inclusion in the OpenBSD tree yet. Its current state is described as a "rough, buggy, issue-filled preview" but that with some exceptions the remaining problems are reasonably understood.

Those wanting to learn more about this GEFS file-system for Plan 9 and OpenBSD can learn more via the OpenBSD-tech mailing list.