I'm not a filesystem person, but this sets off similar red flags to rolling your own encryption.

Isn't writing a robust file system something that routinely takes on the order of decades? E.g. reiserfs, bcachefs, btrfs.

Not to rain on anyone's parade. The project looks cool. But if you're writing an OS, embarking on a custom ZFS-inspired file system seems like the ultimate yak shaving expedition.

Sometimes doing things because they are hard is a great reason to do them to see if the reasons those things are hard are still valid. Doing a filesystem in Rust potentially mitigates some of those things. Most existing filesystems have gone through a lengthy stabilization phase where using them meant exposing yourself to nasty data corruption bugs, obscure race issues, and other issues that, when you root cause them, have a lot to do with the kinds of things Rust explicitly addresses (memory safety, safe concurrency, etc.). So there's a great argument to just try to leverage those features to make things easier and try to build an awesome file system.

Worst case this doesn't work. Best case, this works amazingly well. I think there's some valid reason for optimism here give other hard things that Rust has been used for in the past few years.

You're talking about a project to write their own OS for ultimately the fun of it. It probably shouldn't be too surprising that attitude extends elsewhere.

The people who just think OSes would be better with more Rust in them, but aren't looking to reinvent from first principles are in the Rust for Linux universe.

And you know what, that's fine. Linux started out as a hobby project with similar origins before it became a big serious OS.

I see Redox as an incubator of new developments for a low level Rust ecosystem. It's not a production ready OS, its purpose is to spark new ideas, propose alternative implementations, try on new paths, etc. I see them implementing a ZFS variant as completely in-line with this objective.

There needs to be projects like that for any kind of innovation to happen.

I don't believe in the "never roll your own encryption" it's literally giving up. Does it make economic sense, or is it just for a hobby? That's more debatable. It's also like a foil of 'don't use regex to parse html' or whatever, where the thread gets closed for comments.

The filesystem is so deeply connected to the OS I bet there's a lot of horror around swapping those interfaces. On the contrary, I've never heard anything bad about DragonflyBSD's HAMMER. But it's basically assumed you're using DragonFlyBSD.

Would I keep a company's database on a new filesystem? No, nobody would know how to recover it from failed disk hardware.

This isn't really my area but a Rust OS using a ZFS-like filesystem seems like a lot of classic Linux maintainer triggers. What a funny little project this is. It's the first I've heard of Redox.

Edit: reminds me of The Tarpit chapter from the Mythical Man Month

> The fiercer the struggle, the more entangling the tar, and no beast is so strong or so skillful but that he ultimately sinks.

i don't think it has to be all that robust yet as it mostly runs in vms (even though it may be!).

an internet community project to write an entire operating system from scratch using some newfangled programming language is literally the final boss of yak shaving. there is no reason to do it other than "it's fun" and of course writing a filesystem for it would be fun.

Redox Os is a microkernel operating system, completely different from monolithic kernels like Linux or BSD. I doubt it'll be easy to get existing ZFS drivers working on it at all.

Normally I'd say the same, but it is a matter of what your goals are. Ifnyour goal is to try new things and learn about computers on the way, why the hell not write your own filesystem as well?

If your goal is to gain wide adoption fast, that is a bad idea.

Isn't brtfs itself just a ZFS-inspired filesystem? If that can manage to find a foothold, why can't this?