OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Oct 2009 21:13 UTC, submitted by poundsmack

John Siracusa, the Mac OS X guru who writes those insanely detailed and well-written Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica, once told a story about the evolution of the HFS+ file system in Mac OS X - he said it was a struggle between the Mac guys who wanted the features found in BeOS' BFS, and the NEXT guys who didn't really like these features. In the end, the Mac guys won, and over the course of six years, Mac OS X reached feature parity - and a little more - with the BeOS (at the FS level).

1 · Read More · 95 Comment(s)

http://osne.ws/h9w

Permalink for comment 390784
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.

RE: Comment by kaiwai

by jwwf on Sat 24th Oct 2009 01:24 UTC in reply to "Comment by kaiwai"

Member since:
2006-01-19

The fundamental problem I think people are avoiding to address is ZFS major memory hogging; this might be ok if you have a massive multi-core monster with minimum 2GB memory to get decent performance. That isn't acceptable for a file system that is supposed to 'rule them all' that can scale from an embedded iPhone/iPod Touch device all the way up to a Mac Pro with a high end configuration.

I'd be more willing to agree if it wasn't for personal experience with my core 2 macbook hitting swap every day with 1gb and leopard. It wasn't really usable until I upgraded (to 4gb).

Anyway, I had hoped for ZFS on the Mac, but I'm just as annoyed that they are removing UFS. HFS+ doesn't even support sparse files.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 4