In like a lion, out like a Snow Leopard? Apple changed its spots on Sun's ZFS fairly quickly. This week the company shutterd the ZFS Project on Mac OS Forge, and there's no hide or hair of ZFS to be found in Snow Leopard. But as with all things open source, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Free Software Movement launched the Windows7sins site. This was just days before Apple released its Snow Leopard OS, prompting a lot of criticisms from some corners of the blogosphere that the FSF is giving Apple a free ride. I simply disagree.

ZFS is an advanced filesystem created by Sun Microsystems but not supported in the Linux kernel. The ZFS_on_FUSE project allows you to use ZFS through the Linux kernel as a FUSE filesystem. This means that a ZFS filesystem will be accessible just like any other filesystem the Linux kernel lets you use.

DRBD is a Linux project to provide a real-time distributed filesystem. Although it has some clustering support, it's not really a true clustered filesystem like OCFS2 or GFS2. What it provides is a mirrored copy of a block device across a network

The filesystem used in the vast majority of Linux (and to a lesser extent on other Unix) distributions is the ext3 filesystem, which stands for extended filesystem. Slashdot recently pointed to an article on IBM DeveloperWorks discussing the new ext4 filesystem currently in development, and some of its new features. So what is a filesystem really?

With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. With MySQLfs you can throw a filesystem into a MySQL database and take advantage of whatever database backup, clustering, and replication setup you have to protect your MySQLfs filesystem.

Despite begin a unique, key marketing feature of Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to open the code behind Grand Central Dispatch under the liberal Apache 2.0 license.

This tutorial shows how to install Ubuntu 12.10 on the btrfs filesystem (with RAID1) on a Hetzner server with two hard drives. While Hetzner's installimage tool doesn't list btrfs as a supported filesystem and only supports software RAID with /dev/md devices, it is still possible to achieve this setup and use the built-in RAID support in btrfs instead of using /dev/md devices.

You can convert your existing Ext3 filesystem to Ext4 with an easy procedure.Things to remember
* Unmount the filesystem before convert
* Filesystem must be non-root
This way you can improve the performance, storage limits and features of your existing filesystem without reformatting and/or reinstalling your OS and softwares.