Lessfs-1.1.0-beta6 is now available for download. This release brings much improved read performance. Lessfs-1.1.0-beta6 should be the last beta release. When no bugs are reported the coming week this code will be released as 1.1.0. People who would like to download a full comparison between zfs,sdfs and lessfs can download the iozone graphs from this location:
Enjoy,
Mark Ruijter
Lessfs-1.1.0-beta4 is now available for download. This release improves write performance when writes are done with small block sizes. The graph below displays the write performance of XFS, the fastest filesystem that is available for Linux and all other de-duplicating filesystems that are available for Linux. Both Lessfs and ZFS-fuse are deduplicating and compressing the data. SDFS does deduplicate but does not compress the data.
This version of lessfs now comes with a ‘per hash’ lock which protects a hash / data chunk while it is still being written to disk. The way this is done does not effect performance because it is highly granular. This said, I should still check if using a spinlock instead of mutex locking improves performance. Other then that this code looks pretty stable.
For those who are interested in performance. The graph below compares XFS with ZFS-fuse and Lessfs-1.1.0-betaX On read performance Lessfs is outperformed by ZFS. But when it comes to writing, Lessfs is a clear winner. Lessfs will be tuned for metadata operations in the upcoming 2.x release. LFS now uses the high level fuse API but will switch to the lowlevel API for better metadata performance.
This release appears to be stable. Please let me know if you can prove otherwise. 
Lessfs-1.1.0-beta1 has been removed from Sourceforge since it introduced a critical bug.
A new version will be uploaded shortly.
This release fixes a number of mostly minor but nevertheless very annoying bugs.
Lessfs-1.1.0 has a number of advantages over Lessfs-1.0.x.
To name some of the new features:
Since threading is much improved a high number of MAX_THREADS is advised on systems with multiple CPU cores. Since the code has changed a lot I have decided to release this as alpha1. I do expect the code to be fairly stable though. Does anyone know where to buy asbestos underwear?
Enjoy,
Mark Ruijter
With the release of version 1.0.8 lessfs has become pretty stable and is used by many people over the globe. It is therefore becoming more important not to change the lessfs-1.0x code beyond patching the occasional bug. For this reason all new development will now be done on lessfs2. A CVS repository is available on sourceforge for those who would like to monitor development.
Ozgur Akan has setup a mailinglist for lessfs users : lessfs@googlegroups.com
Users who are planning to upgrade from earlier lessfs versions without transaction support should only use this version when they use the file_io backend. You will loose data when you upgrade an older lessfs version to lessfs-1.0.4..lessfs-1.0.7 when you use the file_io backend!
This release enables lessfs to be mounted without the need to specify other options then the configuration file and the mountpoint. Please consult the manual for more details. Eric D. Garver contributed a patch that makes the build process less picky about missing GNU files like INSTALL and NEWS. A bug in lessfs_read has been found by extensive testing with fsx-linux. In cases where a sparse block of data would be followed by a normal block, lessfs_read would return wrong data in some cases. Added automatic migration support for older lessfs versions.
This release fixes a problem where data copied from windows to lessfs (samba) would show the wrong nr of blocks. This would result in du reporting wrong disk usage numbers.
