> While snapshot consistency is useful to keep data consistent, disks often fail over
time. In order to detect corruption, block pointers contain a hash of the data that they
point at. If corrupted data is returned by the underlying storage medium, this is
detected via block hashes. And if a programmer error causes the file system to write
garbage to disk, this can often be caught early. The corruption is reported, and the
damaged data may then be recovered from backups, RAID restoration, or some other
means.
Okay! It's got CoW, snapshots, and data checksums. Therefore, it's good enough to compete with ZFS while being way smaller and permissively licensed. Now I just want it ported to Linux and the other BSDs:)
I've been following (and helping test) gefs on 9front for a while now. 9front's nightly builder has been running off of it for quite a while. Ori's done a fantastic job.
Ori B. it's a great programmer, he fixed a small bug on the earlier GeFS on 9front versions in no time. It worked fine in my n270 based Atom netbook under 9front, so it will run perfectly well under OpenBSD in a near future.
It isn't as resource heavy as ZFS, and it will be more reliable than FFS, for sure.
From https://orib.dev/gefs.pdf -
> While snapshot consistency is useful to keep data consistent, disks often fail over time. In order to detect corruption, block pointers contain a hash of the data that they point at. If corrupted data is returned by the underlying storage medium, this is detected via block hashes. And if a programmer error causes the file system to write garbage to disk, this can often be caught early. The corruption is reported, and the damaged data may then be recovered from backups, RAID restoration, or some other means.
Okay! It's got CoW, snapshots, and data checksums. Therefore, it's good enough to compete with ZFS while being way smaller and permissively licensed. Now I just want it ported to Linux and the other BSDs:)
There was a recent presentation on this at EuroBSDCon for those interested.
https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2026/talk/NVMSCJ/
https://exquisite.tube/w/3QQimMdswWJxrsPaJtak2u
I've been following (and helping test) gefs on 9front for a while now. 9front's nightly builder has been running off of it for quite a while. Ori's done a fantastic job.
Talk at EuroBSDCon 2026: https://exquisite.tube/w/3QQimMdswWJxrsPaJtak2u
> The git repo is hidden on shithub
Heh :)
GEFS: A Good Enough File System https://orib.dev/gefs.pdf
This is great timing considering I'm currently dealing with FFS corruption after my OpenBSD server lost power during a storm.
Finally . Very good work team !
Ori B. it's a great programmer, he fixed a small bug on the earlier GeFS on 9front versions in no time. It worked fine in my n270 based Atom netbook under 9front, so it will run perfectly well under OpenBSD in a near future.
It isn't as resource heavy as ZFS, and it will be more reliable than FFS, for sure.