11 May
2005
11 May
'05
2:46 p.m.
Boaz Harrosh wrote:
1. NTFS is already fully supported in ReactOS! By
Microsoft. As
shown by
the Captive project. (You did merge back the Captive
project Cache
manager and file system stuff right?) If ReactOS is to support WinNT
device drivers than that means, File-System device drivers as well.
Native Knoppix has Captive by default and you can ask my friends of how
happy they are for the stuff I saved them from a Bad and crushed XP HD.
OK so it is not Implemented yet, but it is 85% and it could be if
someone wants to merge Captive subsystems.
Being able to load MS's ntfs driver is a good development goal, as doing
so would demonstrate that our kernel really is compatible with NT and
provide some means of accessing NTFS volumes from ReactOS with
relatively little work. Long term however, we still need our own
implementation of a preferred filesystem.
2. I have not been to Wineconf-2005, but from the
summery what I could
see is that one of the key notes was the Samba team. Now ReactOS is
going to use Samba right? Or are you going to do your own
Windows-for-Workgroups Implementation? Well Samba4 has all these things
missing from ext2/ext3, implemented on top, has an extra layer. They
call it VNTFS. By use of Samba you will get that for free. Wine is going
to use samba to replicate all the needed Win32 API(s).
Now in order for ReactOS to use Samba it will need it's POSIX layer
pretty polished up.
No. ReactOS will not use Samba anymore than we use WINE, which is to
say, we might borrow bits of code here and there, but as a whole, the
project is radically different than what we need. Samba is a server
that runs on Linux and emulates a lanman/cifs/whatever MS is calling it
these days server. What ReactOS would need is a real implementation of
the lanman server on an NT kernel, not a hacked emulation on top of posix.
Heck, I am starting to wonder why we really need to support lanman at
all when there are open standards supported by the OSS community
already, such as WebDav.
In summery what I think should be is: A new
installation, out of the
box, installs ext3 with the Samba VNTFS layers and every thing is happy
and free. A user that wants to dual boot or Replace but not loose
his/her Windows NTFS HD, will be prompt for the Windows system
directory, the NTFS drivers, which are legally his (Hence the existence
of the NTFS partition), are copied and happily used by ReactOS. ReactOS
does not Create new NTFS partitions but other wise supports them to the
letter, by running MS drivers and utilities. It must do that to be true
to its goal, as stated on the front page: Run any Windows application
and any Windows-NT device driver. Including those from MS, as legally
owned by the user. For any other free use of ReactOS the native FS is
ext2/3 with Samba VNTFS extensions.
As I have said already, I do not believe that ext2/3 adequately supports
the features we need, but then I do not completely understand how Samba
manages to emulate the things it needs. I will bet though that the
emulation does not work as well as having the real thing.
Mark Junker wrote:
That's much too complicated. Simply use ReiserFS 4
because it implements
all (!) features that are provided by NTFS.
It does? Maybe I should do some reading on it. Can it really store
alternate data streams and NT security descriptors? What about on the
fly compression? Encryption? Offline storage?