[ros-dev] ReactOS File System

[D. Hazelton]

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