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).
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Member since:2005-07-24
I've certainly seen this sort of thing happen - to some test systems thankfully. I just don't think ext4 is necessary in any way. ext3 was the end of the the line for the ext filesystem...
Hey! Extents are nice. And safe. 48 bit is nice. And safe. Delayed allocation was reckless... and not safe. Turn it off, and continue enjoying the stability of EXTx. And shame Ted T'so when appropriate. He'll notice, eventually. He's just living in his own little File-System Superstar world right now.
Edited 2009-10-26 23:01 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Hey! Extents are nice. And safe. 48 bit is nice. And safe.
Yes they are nice additions, but I would have preferred the addressing of concerns like dynamic inode allocation which would have been a nice improvement over ext2/3. It's a very common problem, running out of inodes. I certainly understand the backwards compatibility reasons for that, but it's a very common and real problem nonetheless.
While I respect the need for backwards compatibility with filesystems and why new filesystems like ZFS often have a tough time, I can't help but feel we're at the end of the line.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I've certainly seen this sort of thing happen - to some test systems thankfully. I just don't think ext4 is necessary in any way. ext3 was the end of the the line for the ext filesystem line and I don't think stretching the codebase out any further to do things it wasn't mean to do has done anyone any good.