[TUHS] H.J. Lu Bootable Root & Base System disks

[tytso at mit.edu]

Sorry for not responding on this thread earlier; I've been pretty
swamped lately.

Xiafs was introduced at about the same time of ext2; Wikipedia states that

   "Initially, Xiafs was more stable than ext2, but being a fairly
   minimalistic modification of the MINIX file system, it was not very
   well suited for future extension."

The first part wasn't quite accurate.  It turns out that xiafs had the
same bug as ext2, but ext2 had the necessary sanity checking so that
it actually issued a warning when the bug was triggered, where xiafs
just silently corrupted the file system.

The real issue was that xiafs was mostly a one-person show (namely
Frank Xia) and he suffered blowback when he tried to rename xiafs to
linuxfs, which was interpreted by many as a marketing effort --- about
as tone-deaf as Stallman trying to jawbone people to rename "Linux" to
"LiGNUx" ten years later.

And xiafs was technically worse compared to ext2, and ext2 had a
larger number of developers.  So xiafs never really stood much of a
chance.

Also, by that point, very few people were actually using HJ's
boot/root disks.  Most developers had moved on to the MCC distribution
by that time, since it was more comprehensive, and it was easier to
bootstrap a working development system.

So to be honest, I had never noticed that HJ was trying to use xiafs
in his boot/root disks.

Cheers,

					- Ted