15 Feb
2006
15 Feb
'06
2:41 a.m.
On Tuesday 14 February 2006 17:46, Rick Langschultz wrote:
I have actually looked at the EXT2 and EXT3 file
systems, and admire
them, however Reiser4 and ZFS are the best looking and they have
great specs such as file access time, etc. Also, ZFS supports many
things NTFS supports. Though I would love to have ReactOS support
things like lower level file system rollback, file junctions,
symlinks, etc...
At this point Reiser4, to my knowledge (and from tracking it's progress
towards integration into the Linux kernel), is not ready for production use.
If you really want an NTFS style filesystem, I remember seeing the
documentation behind OS/2's HPFS a long time ago...
As anyone that has tracked the history of NT knows, NTFS started from HPFS and
diverged. (Hell, it even uses the same OS Id flag in the partition table)
One problem with implementing a filesystem like that is that you can either go
IBM's route where the OS periodically "cleans up" the filesystem (and locks
the machine in the process) or just do as M$ did and lose that performance
advantage.
Truth be told, a *Nix style filesystem is simpler and cleaner. And _most_ now
have support for ACL's and other early advantages of NTFS. The only problem
with a Unix style filesystem is that each filesystem does have a maximum
number of files, though those limits are often hard to reach.
In any event I have done some (though by all means not exhaustive) research
into filesystem design and am available to assist in any design (though not
coding) people might wish to do. If NTFS support is wanted in ReactOS, the
NTFS code in the Linux kernel does provide a good starting point. The
read-only limitation Linux has is, IIRC, more related to the fact that the
VFS layer cannot properly handle the multiple simultaneous updates needed to
maintain consistency on an NTFS partition.
On Feb 14, 2006, at 4:02 PM, Jerry wrote:
> I've been wanting to try my hand at file systems too. Have you
> looked at ext2/3 for insporation?
>
> Rick Langschultz wrote:
>> I am writing a file system for personal development use for
>> reactos. I want to take a poll about what File System features
>> that ReactOS would like to implement in its distribution. Are
>> there any features out there that ReactOS developers like to
>> implement in ReactOS. I want to model the file system on NTFS but
>> i have been looking at Sun's ZFS and think that it would be a
>> great File System for React...
<snip>
DRH