By William Fellows

Perhaps Silicon Graphics Inc should have changed its name to OSI instead of SGI, as open source seems to be becoming its mantra. Today the company will turn over its well-regarded XFS 64-bit journaled file system to the open source community, hoping that it will eventually end up as the default files system within Linux distributions.

Linux currently sports a ext2fs file system, says SGI, which is not capable of taking Linux forwards into enterprise-class, scalable systems territory. SGI says it will provide a version of XFS source code that will be compilable for Linux/Intel. File system specialist Veritas Software Corp is co-developing the software. Does that mean it has got the MIPS-based Irix, SGI’s flavor of Unix from whence XFS comes, up on an IA-64 simulator? We don’t know. Although SGI is migrating lock, stock and barrel to IA-64, it side-stepped the issue by suggesting the XFS source it supplies is not tied to a specific instruction set.

SGI claims the project has significant backing within the open source community though it declined to say who would be supporting the project apart from Veritas. The journaled XFS, like other Unix files systems, keeps track of all file transactions, enabling them to be rolled back if required. It can handle 18m 1Tb file systems. Upon this platform SGI says it will be possible to add high-availability, clustering and other services, looking as if it is setting itself up to turn these functions over to the open source community as well. It also sees a time when Linux will be able to take advantage of ccNUMA distributed shared memory architectures.

Indeed at this week’s Linux Expo in Raleigh, North Carolina, SGI will be showing off a slew of technologies that will be next for the open source treatment if it can garner enough interest including a rules-based web balancing system, a systems performance tool and perhaps most interestingly a prototype user interface which can be used with standard Linux development tools. Why is SGI so taken with Linux? Because it is the developer market of choice.