FTRFS: New Fault-Tolerant File-System Proposed For Linux

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Antique-Fee-6877@reddit

Don’t we already have enough filesystems at this point? Damn near collecting them like Pokémon.

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Liam_Mercier@reddit

This one sounds cool though, even if you will never use it for your home computer

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budgetboarvessel@reddit

There's got to be a zoo of them to discover which ones work best. Same for distros and DEs and stuff.

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i-hate-birch-trees@reddit

This is a very special-use FS, so it's not like you're going to be using it at home, unless you live in Fukushima.

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elsjpq@reddit

I'd absolutely use this for cold storage

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huskypuppers@reddit

Hey now, don't forget about Chernobyl!

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Sol33t303@reddit

Tbh I don't think anybody other then NASA is interested in a radiation resistant filesystem. This doesn't sound like something that is intended to try and replace the others.

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Sol33t303@reddit

I don't think most people tend to live in space or inside nuclear reactors.

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DonaldMerwinElbert@reddit

So...there are plenty "other than NASA" that are interested?
That's what I thought.

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FarReachingConsense@reddit

ZFS seem super overkill and complicated for something that just needs to keep running forever

You can create a zfs volume on a single drive with a single command. You have no mirroring, sure, but it's dead simple and you get all of ZFS other features like checksumming and bitrot detection and correction.

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Sol33t303@reddit

This has nothing to do with the user facing interface and commands for managing and creating filesystems. I'm sure NASA has plenty of people more then capable of setting up ZFS volumes.

It's about the complexity of the kernel code that handles ZFS volumes. In order to have a filesystem with the ability to have so many features, you need to have a kernel module with more complicated code, thats just a matter of fact. And complicated code has more area for bugs to occur and more failure points.

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FarReachingConsense@reddit

Yeah, you're right, I overread that we are talking about small 32MB drives. ZFS is just overkill here.

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acdcfanbill@reddit

and correction.

Well, you don't necessarily get error correction with a single disk vdev. If you set copies=2 to store two copies of every datablock (i think metadata is already stored multiple times), so in that cause you could recover from bitrot that only affects 1 copy of a block.

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FarReachingConsense@reddit

Good point.

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LousyMeatStew@reddit

New idea for a sci-fi story: first contact with an alien species occurs but it's because they found a NASA probe running Linux and are asking for the source code. Once we give it to them, they leave and we never hear from them again.

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Responsible-Bread996@reddit

That isn't a bad point.

A few people are talking about space data centers.

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dvandyk@reddit

It is supposed to be used in radiation-intensive environments, which lead to likely degradation of the on-disk data (and the file system's metadata). Pretty niche, pretty cool, pretty useful for a select few!

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FlukyS@reddit

And to be fair they could even just make this and keep it out of the Linux tree, it being merged upstream for Linux itself means that it could be used in applications beyond the specific one they are developing for in theory. This is a great thing

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Pitiful-Welcome-399@reddit

probably would be used on satellites and etc.

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Vittulima@reddit

I mean the article did mention space

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Pitiful-Welcome-399@reddit

also since you are on opensuse, how's the transition to Sysd boot went for you?

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Vittulima@reddit

I've been using it for a few years. Nothing to complain about, works better than GRUB for me.

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maxi2702@reddit

Not niche once ww3 hits.

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LousyMeatStew@reddit

The reason why Linux is everywhere is because we can add support for all these corner cases. As of Linux 7, we even have support for nullfs: a file system that can't contain files.

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Rockytriton@reddit

If you don’t need it, don’t build it into your kernel 🤷

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CaptainNemo3178@reddit

IYKYK

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alou-S@reddit

Seems like absolutely nobody cared to read the article itself and are just commenting.

To everython saying that "wow yet another fs" or "isn't this just btrfs"

No this is not "yet another filesystem". This is not even meant for most average users.

Quoting the article "This file-system is designed for use in radiation-intensive environments such as within space and other harsh environmental conditions"

It has more comprehensive check summing, proper reed solomon error correction (unlike btrfs which basically uses RAID as EC), and proper error tracking and memory tracking, write protection.....
Basically true fault tolerance.

This is nothing like btrfs and is not something you would want to implement in current filesystems and is a decently good reason to be its own filesystem.

One thing I'm skeptical about is "Given the increasing interest in space-based super compute / data centers in low-earth orbit". From my limited understanding and research of this topic, dumping data centers into space is an extremely stupid idea for many many reasons and has so so many problems to solve before it is an actually viable idea.

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deviled-tux@reddit

Data centres in space is dumb af, the only way to cool the damn thing would be through radiation lmao it would literally cook itself

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

Data centres in space is dumb af, the only way to cool the damn thing would be through radiation lmao it would literally cook itself

I think you're getting confused. Cooling is actually the easiest part of the equation. What it sound like you're combining is the idea of "radiation" and the idea that heat can "radiate" out into space.

Because obviously you wouldn't blast electronics with radiation to cool them down because there's no way a person who can dress themselves in the morning would propose that.

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deviled-tux@reddit

There are 4 methods of heat transfer:

Radiation
Convection
Conduction
Advection

In space only radiation works because there is no physical stuff around to use the other 3 methods.

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

Again, you have confused radiomagnetic radiation with the concept of "radiating"

Sound radiates. Light radiates. It's a description of how things move. No one is proposing to blast electronics with atomic radiation. You just conflated two different things that just happen to use the same root word.

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deviled-tux@reddit

No one is proposing to blast electronics with atomic radiation. You just conflated two different things that just happen to use the same root word.

No one but you mentioned “atomic radiation”.

Either you can’t read or you just like to feel superior. In any case it’s not my problem.

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

No one but you mentioned “atomic radiation”.

Then how does heat radiating out into space involve the electronics "cooking itself" ?

Either you can’t read or you just like to feel superior.

This is so basic that I don't think it could feed a superiority complex even if I went through mental gymnastics. I'm just trying to convey the idea that you've clearly misunderstood something. It's not really that big of a deal.

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preparationh67@reddit

Electronics that do not dissipate their waste heat fast enough to not cook themselves to death would cook themselves to death smartass.

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cemented-lightbulb@reddit

Then how does heat radiating heat out into space (away from the electronics) involve the electronics "cooking itself" ?

i think you're misunderstanding their original comment. it's not the heat radiating off that cooks the electronics, it's the fact that (in their mind) radiation would be too slow to be effective heating, so the electronics would get too hot and "cook themselves." yes, they were wrong that cooling is an actual problem, but they weren't trying to suggest that heat radiating away from electronics would cause them harm.

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

i think you're misunderstanding their original comment. it's not the heat radiating off that cooks the electronics, it's the fact that (in their mind) radiation would be too slow to be effective heating,

I appreciate the impulse to try to find a more sensible reading but they were pretty clearly talking about ionizing radiation.

There's no universal constant for how fast heat leaves a system. Satellites also have to radiate heat into space. Obviously, if we can radiate heat out of the same computers under the heat blanket of an atmosphere this is not going to somehow start being a problem when you're in the cold vacuum of space.

Obviously, there are challenges regarding to the larger project but the idea that there's just fundamentally no way to radiate enough heat if you just change the physical location. That feels like it would be an even more basic error and that may not be giving them enough credit to think that they thought that.

It seems more likely they just thought "radiate" meant "ionizing radiation" since the public often uses the two interchangeably.

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BitLooter@reddit

I appreciate the impulse to try to find a more sensible reading but they were pretty clearly talking about ionizing radiation.

Not only was it extremely clear they were talking about blackbody radiation to everybody but you, they already explicitly told you you're misunderstanding what they said. You made a mistake, stop doubling down on it.

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crystalchuck@reddit

Obviously, if we can radiate heat out of the same computers under the heat blanket of an atmosphere this is not going to somehow start being a problem when you're in the cold vacuum of space

Do you understand that the atmosphere actually makes this much easier?

but the idea that there's just fundamentally no way to radiate enough heat if you just change the physical location isn't coherent

Of course, with unlimited money and resources, everything that is theoretically possible is also feasible. We don't have that luxury IRL though.

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cemented-lightbulb@reddit

I appreciate the impulse to try to find a more sensible reading but they were pretty clearly talking about ionizing radiation.

this interpretation is entirely of your own making. yes, satellites have to radiate heat, but considering that data centers on earth need to use a noticeable percentage of the world's water supply to keep them cool, i think it's reasonable to intuit that what works for satellites won't be fast enough for data centers. yes, they were wrong, but it's not unreasonable to think that if you haven't done field-specific research

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sinfaen@reddit

Cooking itself as there isn't enough heat transfer to prevent overheating, there's no indication here that it's literal ionizing radiation dude

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

I've already responded but there's literally no other reading other than "ionizing radiation" without implying the other user has suffered some sort of massive brain damage.

Put succinctly thinking we can dissipate heat on Earth but for some reason can't if we put them into space is an even more basic error. I'm sure you're not meaning to but you're implying the other user is an idiot.

Which is ultimately the problem I had with their approach. They were basically implying people who committed their lives to the subject are just complete idiots and then doubled down with a bunch of confused responses trying to find a way to still be correct because they were apparently alright with implying I was too stupid to tell what they meant at first.

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BashfulMelon@reddit

I was too stupid to tell what they meant at first.

You were. Everybody else understood it. Happens to the best of us. Own up to it and move on.

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Restioson@reddit

It would "cook itself" (read: heat up too much) if radiating heat were too slow to cool it.

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Hopeful-Ad-607@reddit

You're the only one who's confused here. Radiation here refers to infrared black-body radiation.

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nelmaloc@reddit

Someone did the math, and it looks like it can be done.

Of course, there's no actual reason to do so.

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deviled-tux@reddit

This video seems glorious so I will check it out

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peva3@reddit

Scott is an absolute legend, man is as legit as his accent. He's also a former high up Apple dev and has a really hot wife, dudes basically winning life.

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DheeradjS@reddit

Of course there is a reason. Projects like that are known as a Subsidy Sponge.

They serve to shovel huge amounts of tax money into priovate pockets

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Glittering_Abies4915@reddit

Data centres in space is moronic for a lot of reasons, but cooling isn't really an issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80

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frymaster@reddit

that's a cool video but it's not talking about a datacenter in space, it's talking about a satellite with a 20kW heat load. That's a single GPU server. An important reason for a datacenter is to put lots of GPUs next to each other in order use lots of fast low-latency networking. They use copper for close connections, not lasers, because the act of converting the signal to and from electrical to light takes too long.

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FlukyS@reddit

Yeah it looks like something specifically designed for stuff like probes, space stations or whatever. There are really weird challenges once you leave the atmosphere when it comes to radiation so you'd need specific tolerances in both software and hardware to deal with it. You are worried about bitflipping basically everywhere.

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elsjpq@reddit

I'd love to use this on earth as well. Backups are a crude solution to data corruption, you need at least double the storage and you only get as much protection as your backup interval. This protects from bit flips at any time while using only a fraction more storage.

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TroubledEmo@reddit

Sounds like ZFS?

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mico9@reddit

If it was mine, i would start putting a few GPUs worth into Starlink satellites and see where it goes, but one area where i know there is some serious work going on is weather monitoring where apparently they think it will be useful to have some larger amount of compute available there.

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manobataibuvodu@reddit

datacenters in space is a dumb reason, but if we will actually have private LEO space stations and/or a moon base in the future this will be actually useful there.

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lonelyroom-eklaghor@reddit

Not just for datacenters... space missions or sensitive computers near power plants will benefit from these filesystems

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Guinness@reddit

I really hope they’re using ECC outside of the mesosphere.

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Lower-Limit3695@reddit

A lot of the stuff they bring to space is off the shelf consumer hardware because of costs.

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Lawnmover_Man@reddit

Seems like absolutely nobody cared to read the article itself and are just commenting.

Welcome to Reddit.

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MaybeTheDoctor@reddit

Wikipedia Reed–Solomon error correction

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guri256@reddit

I read the last bit as, “This is actually useful, and I’m hoping it will get some hype because of the interest in data centers in orbit.”

Not that it’s actually claiming data centers in orbit will be useful. Just that they think it’s a good time for this project, because it might be able to get extra interest.

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

To everyone saying that "wow yet another fs" or "isn't this just btrfs"

I'm guessing the latter was a reference to my comment. In which case, I didn't say that. I asked how it compared. We can note how these are different questions.

One is asking a rhetorical question and the other one is trying to understand the goals and benefits of the FTRFS approach. Oh hey look, the thing you quoted does nothing to touch on that.

BTRFS has the ability to automatically fetch good data if you use RAID mirror at the BTRFS level and so my question is what is different about FTRFS that improves on that paradigm.

To actually answer the question, though: After looking into it more it looks like it leans more into FEC and stores parity information in the metadata which allows a reconstruction of lost bits in-flight as opposed to the BTRFS approach which would require redundant copies of the data and relies on a break/fix systems admin approach to fixing corrupted data instead of it just being something the filesystem does for you.

This is nothing like btrfs and is not something you would want to implement in current filesystems and is a decently good reason to be its own filesystem.

You actually might want some of this functionality in regular filesystems fwiw. You just probably wouldn't want FTRFS specifically.

One thing I'm skeptical about is "Given the increasing interest in space-based super compute / data centers in low-earth orbit". From my limited understanding and research of this topic, dumping data centers into space is an extremely stupid idea for many many reasons and has so so many problems to solve before it is an actually viable idea.

That's probably because you didn't really look into this before you decided you were an expert. To clarify, though:

1) They actually target satellite computing use cases. Data centers in space probably isn't unrelated but they don't mention it in their publications and the people involved specifically are involved in designing nano satellites. "Datacenters in space" seems to be Larabel (the guy who wrote the one article you read) seems to be his unfounded assumption based on inference. Which is understandable because I think he posts a million articles a day and can't look into all of them.

2) "Data centers in space" is actually a great idea, it's just a great idea for the 2030's and the fault is with people who act like we're going to do it next week.

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electric_machinery@reddit

It'll be great for spacecraft of all sorts.

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nelmaloc@reddit

One thing I'm skeptical about is "Given the increasing interest in space-based super compute / data centers in low-earth orbit".

The paper focuses on small (<4MB) systems, and their satellite has 32MB. I think the datacenter part it's just marketing.

From my limited understanding and research of this topic, dumping data centers into space is an extremely stupid idea for many many reasons and has so so many problems to solve before it is an actually viable idea.

You can do it, but the only reason for it would be a lack of land. On any other metric it's worse off.

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Natural_Night9957@reddit

Why do I feel like this new fs is intended military applications?

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WeepingAgnello@reddit

From the article: Fault-Tolerant Radiation-Robust Filesystem. For use in radiation-intensive environments, such as space.

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ButtonExposure@reddit

What about high toxicity environments, such as the office?

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

The FAT COW filesystem, maybe?

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budgetboarvessel@reddit

Not sure if File Allocation Table Copy On Write or chonky cattle

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IkBenAnders@reddit

< moo? >
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        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

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wyn10@reddit

Is this creator crazy too? /s

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teressapanic@reddit

Let me guess: distributed copies

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snowtax@reddit

This is the way. Other than copies, how else would you guarantee fault tolerance?

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acdcfanbill@reddit

parity data, for instance, they use Error Correcting Codes on data center RAM, or usenet uses parity archive to protect files. You can balance the amount of data you dedicate to error detection and error correction with ECC.

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snowtax@reddit

It’s always a trade-off. More storage is also required for checksums. You have to decide how much risk you’re willing to accept.

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PurepointDog@reddit

What a pointless comment

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snowtax@reddit

Are you taking up bits to store parity data? Yes, it’s less than a complete copy but one bit of parity can detect only a single bit error, not all possible errors. There is a balance between a complete copy and other strategies. The strategy chosen decides the acceptable risk.

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PurepointDog@reddit

Copy-on-write is one technique. Being able to detect fault is also a priority. Parity bits aren't copies of the data, but they're another approach.

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

This is the first I'm hearing about it but from what I can see it's more checksum heavy and more emphasis on repairing lost data.

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devonnull@reddit

It's more of a Linus reference.

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MaybeTheDoctor@reddit

So distributed raid5

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devonnull@reddit

FTP?

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thetrivialstuff@reddit

This radiation-robust file-system offers CRC32 data integrity

I don't really understand this choice - CRC32 is pretty vulnerable to multiple bit errors happening to get the same checksum result. I get that there's also FEC and presumably a full scrub would check against that, but why have the CRC at all, and not something more robust for that layer?

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Dwedit@reddit

Even MD5 (which has many documented cases of PDFs or GIFs displaying their own hash) would be better here. How would truncated MD5 fare compared to CRC32?

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cryptospartan@reddit

Agree.

Even ZFS has various hashing algorithms to use, like SHA-256 or BLAKE3, which have substantially more bits than CRC32

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nelmaloc@reddit

Performance. Their test system has an ARM Cortex-A5 CPU.

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

Anybody know how this compares to something like BTRFS with RAID mirroring? Can't scrubbing fix data errors?

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nelmaloc@reddit

This filesystem focuses on places where RAID can't work.

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lazer---sharks@reddit

Why can't raid work in those places?

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nelmaloc@reddit

/u/ImpossibleEdge4961 is correct, the paper says

Next-generation FSs, e.g. BTRFS and ZFS, are designed to handle many- terabyte sized devices and RAID-pools. Silent data corruption has become a practical issue with such large volumes [21]. Thus, these FSs can maintain checksums for data blocks and metadata. Due to their intended use in large disk pools, they do also offer integrated multi-device functionality.
Multi-device functionality would certainly be advantageous, but neither ZFS nor BTRFS scale to small storage volumes. Minimum volume sizes are far beyond what current nanosatellite CDHs can offer. Also, future development of these FSs will eventually result in design decisions not in favor of spaceflight application

Their test system has 32MB of storage.

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lazer---sharks@reddit

That's talking about BTRFS and ZFS, but why can you use Raid on systems with 32M of storage?

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ImpossibleEdge4961@reddit

Not sure what they're referring to but the parity information takes up less storage and they explicitly target satellite systems. So I'm guessing it "can't work" in the sense that maybe the storage on the nanosatellites just isn't big enough to hold redundant copies of every bit of data.

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Misicks0349@reddit

space datacentres lol

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FifteenthPen@reddit

Makes sense. We already have butterface, so fatterface is inevitable.

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Jristz@reddit

Look like a successor for JFS and ReiserFS finally Rose up

Lets tope it's get into the Kernel and not ended like BcacheFS or avandoned like JFS

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