[streaming] Re: Streaming Large Amounts of Data

[Adam Hunt]

> Another thing i almost forgot: if you need to dedicate bandwidth
> throughout the whole system, from disk to nic, take a look at irix, it
> has cool tools for managing this and making a system "guarantee" a
> bandwith from disk to daemon etc.

This is because SGI's XFS filesystem was designed from the ground up with high 
bandwidth as a primary goal.  XFS also supports what they call "realtime 
subvolumes".  A realtime subvolume is an dedicated area of the disk where a 
single file is stored.  This allows the data to be in a predictable state 
(i.e. no fragmentation).  It was designed for streaming applications with 
very high bandwidth needs such as VLS or VLC.

SGI has ported XFS to Linux.  It is availible for 2.4 in the form of a patch 
and in the stock 2.5 kernel.  According to Eroc Sandeem at SGI, realtime 
support on Linux XFS is not currently supported but it is for the most part 
fully functional 
(http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-xfs&m=103668342719080&w=2).  Even 
without using realtime subvolumes XFS should (by design at least, I don't 
have any numbers) out perform other filesystems.

More information about the Linux port of XFS can be found at 
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs

--adam
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