[mjevans]

I was thinking that F2FS might be a good filesystem as a base on which you'd use an object storage abstraction layer (like ceph)...

However since I initially saw the news of these drives a few days ago Samsung also axed some Linux devs, which gives me pause and makes me reconsider the long term viability of this filesystem...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS

[kdkeyser]

A full blown filesystem is overkill for an object store. You could use something like libzbc ( https://github.com/hgst/libzbc ) to write directly to the SMR drives on the block level.

I believe Ceph now has abstracted the drives away through BlueStore, which simply puts a large RocksDB database on the drive, bypassing most of the functionality a filesystem offers. It should be much easier to make an SMR compatible version of the LSM-tree backend of RocksDB, than writing a full-blown file system.

[antongribok]

It's not accurate to say that BlueStore is just a large RocksDB...

RocksDB is one of several possible backends for object maps. There is a lot more to BlueStore than just omaps.

Also, BlueStore was actually designed with SMR drives in mind, however certain components of it are best placed on solid state media.