

Recently Daniel Phillips announced that he is developing a new file system, Tux3. It plans to be a modern file system on level with ZFS and the currently also still in development Btrfs.



While there are many file systems like ext3, Xfs, Jfs and others are available for Linux it currently lacks a modern, new age file system: especially features like versions and writable snapshots are hardly available. On the other hand, other Unixes do have such file systems: OpenSolaris and some BSDs have ZFS, and DragonFly BSD has HAMMER.

To fill this gap the Oracle’s Chris Manson started the development of Btrfs a year ago. Now Daniel Phillips also announced that he is developing a new file system, Tux3. The general aims are indeed close to the general aims of the other mentioned file systems.

Also, Daniel is not new to file system development. Years ago he announced Tux2 as an improvement to ext2 but without journaling. However, that file system never started off due to patent reasons.

The question is of course which file system will make the run: Tux3 is still at the beginning, while Btrfs could see a first beta in the next months. But there are still rumors that ZFS might be released under the GPL, and Hammer could also be implemented for Linux.

Either way, exciting times for file systems on Linux are ahead