[NILFS] Current Status

Basic operations via standard system calls on Linux
- mount(), umount(), open(), close(), read(), write(), fsync(), ...
Snapshots
- Automatically and continuously taken, you can retrieve past state of NILFS filesystem
- Simultaneously mountable
- Mountable as read-only file systems via the assigned number
Simple roll-backing and roll-forwarding in the mounting phase if the file system was not unmounted cleanly

The following items will be committed.

Variety of Garbage Collection policies.
Supporting block sizes smaller than the page size (e.g. 1KB or 2KB for the i386 architecture).
- NILFS version 2 supports smaller block size (Nov 29, 2007)
Better error handling.
Sophisticated file system interface.
Snapshot management mechanism.
Basic administration tools such as fsck.
O_DIRECT support.
-- Direct I/O read was implemented on NILFS 1.0.5; direct I/O write is falled back to the buffered write at present. (Jan 30, 2006)
Efficient synchronous write operations including fsync(), open() with O_SYNC, and so on.
Online resizing.
An extended attribute support.
Quota support.
atime support.
Filesystem label support.
Redundant mechanism for critically important blocks (the super block and the segusage blocks).
B-tree base directory management.
More sophisticated B-tree node block management.
Fixing identified bugs (to be described).
Testing on the other architectures.
- NILFS version 2 supports x86, x86_64 and ppc64 (Nov 5, 2007)
Performance tuning (e.g. read ahead).
Source code cleanup.
Documentation.

The following items are also planned for the NILFS project. We welcome your contributions.

"Time-based" tools (e.g. tls, tdiff, tgrep, tfind, ttar and so on. They come from the Elephant file system).
GUI tools.
GNU GRUB support.
POSIX ACL support.
Execute-in-Place (XIP) support.
Porting to MS-Windows (some people want it).
Native Language Support (NLS).
Extent support.
Better support of remote block devices (e.g. iSCSI).
Optimization of the cleaner is one of main challenges in the NILFS project.
Seamless backup mechanism of accumulated past data to the secondary drives or the remote drives.
And more...

Following is a list of issues that have been identified. These will be solved in the future version of NILFS.

Deletion a large file takes very long time.
The df command displays the wrong amount of disk space available on the NILFS file system.
...

A maintenance releases of NILFS version 1 are still available on "Recent releases" section of download page or Source file archive page.