[ros-general] Microsoft wants royalties for use of FAT

[Frank D. Engel, Jr.]

Well, it was just a suggestion, so granted there are some minuses,
but...

> it could - *if* we want a sloppy and inefficient implementation. ACLs
> have 
> arbitrary length and are in the vast majority of cases inherited from
> the 
> parent directory: NTFS, in fact, collapses identical ACLs. And 

And the collapsed binary version couldn't be stored in a binary
attribute?  Attributes of parent nodes couldn't be checked for
inheritance?

> that's
> just 
> an example. Just speaking feature-wise, NTFS has DOS attributes and
> DOS 
> short filenames, OS/2 extended attributes, sparse files, compression,

various filenames and OS/2 attributes could be stored in extended
attributes (easily), and even indexed (BFS) for efficient searching
capabilities.  As for compression, you can still compress the data and
use an attribute to store the compression status; same with encryption.
 Named streams could either be dropped, or supported by storing in
multiple files.  object IDs could be stored in attributes.

> encryption, named streams, per-file object ids, reparse points and
> god 
> knows how many minor ones I've left out. But that's just overlooking
> the by 
> far biggest issue: what about user ids? Windows NT has globally
> unique user 
> ids of arbitrary length, vs the fixed-length, locally unique user ids

SIDs could be stored in attributes, and the attributes could be indexed
for efficiency -- this is all supported quite nicely by BFS.

> 
> normally found elsewhere. Before you ask: yes, files need to be
> indexed by 
> SID. Quota management requires it. Good luck implementing all of that
> with 
> extended attributes 

Compression and encryption are separate issues.  BTW, the suggestion
was to support a filesystem OTHER THAN existing ones, so expect
different advantages AND disadvantages...

All of those features of NTFS imply added storage overhead, too, which
makes it impractical for use on smaller volumes (floppy/zip disks, for
example).  Of course, this is true of many modern filesystems, which is
probably the REAL reason that FAT is still so commonly used on those devices.

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Frank D. Engel, Jr.

Modify the equilibrium of the vertically-oriented particle decelerator to result in the reestablishment of its resistance to counterproductive atmospheric penetration.

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