Aurelien Desbrieres has proposed BeamFS, an experimental file system for the Linux kernel focused on data integrity.
It employs Reed–Solomon error correction to protect data from hardware-level corruption, including radiation and EMI, on single-drive configurations.
By enforcing integrity checks during reads and rejecting corrupted blocks, it provides a robust alternative to current implementations like Btrfs or ext4 when handling hardware-induced bit-flips.
It was created by Aurelien Desbrieres. It is designed to protect data from corruption caused by radiation, electromagnetic interference, and other equipment failures. To be able to recover corrupted data, it stores additional information and requires about 7% more space. It also protects the information that the system itself uses to organize files and folders.
When reading data, BeamFS checks for corruption and attempts to fix it before handing it over to the operating system. If it cannot recover it, it returns an error rather than implicitly giving data that may be incorrect.
Desbrieres published results from experimental tests on Linux systems. In tests where a bit was artificially corrupted, BeamFS recovered the original data in almost all cases. When it failed, it returned an error. In the same tests, ext3 and ext4 sometimes returned corrupted data without detecting the problem. Btrfs detected the corruption, but was unable to fix it. The results are only for the specific scenarios and are not a general comparison of file system reliability.
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BeamFS is not yet secure for regular use. It lacks some features that help protect data in the event of an unexpected crash. So, such a crash may require a full scan of the file system. Its documentation also warns of known issues that can cause data loss, security vulnerabilities, or cause Linux to stop working. Some of these have already been fixed in the version currently in development.
The proposal is still in the early stages of consideration and discussion among Linux developers. It has not been announced if or when BeamFS will be accepted into the mainline Linux kernel.
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