A new RFC patch series proposes BeamFS, a Reed-Solomon protected file system for Linux, built for single-disk systems in radiation-prone places like satellites and radiotherapy rooms.
How it works
- Every data block is a capsule of sixteen interleaved RS(255,239) codewords. Every read decodes it, and corrupted bytes are corrected in place with no second copy needed.
- If the decoder can’t vouch for a read, it fails with -EIO instead of returning wrong data.
- Metadata (directories, inodes, allocation bitmap, superblock) carries parity too.
- Overhead is 288 bytes per 4 KB block, about 7%.
BeamFS replaces the stalled FTRFS proposal from April with a new design and on-disk format, and it has to clear the kernel’s newer, stricter guidance for adding file systems.
My take
Most of us will never need this, but “fail loudly instead of returning wrong bytes” is a great principle for any storage.
