Linux 2.6.15 has been released after two months and a week of development. You can check the comprehensible changelog or grep the full changelog. There are some new features like shared subtrees, UDP fragmentation offload, PPP MPPE encryption (VPN), NTFS write support (except for creating files), PPC64 thermal improvements, support for the late-2005 powerbook series, SATA passthru support (for SMART), console rotation for fbcon, nf_conntrack subsystem, some scalability and performance improvements, and lots of other changes. As always, download it from Kernel.org, or wait for your distributor to ship it.
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Member since:2005-07-06
This is a honest question from someone who does not know truly the mechanics of a filesystem. What about making a "portable" filesystem
There IS a portable filesystem, supported by approx 80% of general purpose operating systems. It's called FAT32. Linux supports it, all versions of Windows 95 and up support it, Mac OS 9 and OS X support it, Bluebottle does, Plan 9 does, BeOS does, AROS does, the BSDs do, probably RISC OS and AmigaOS as well, as well as a whole slew of other OSes.
The problem is that FAT32 isn't very advanced and has it's limits, but if you want something advanced, you lose the portable aspect very quickly.
One step up from FAT32 would perhaps be EXT2, which is supported on BeOS, Windows (according to post above), Mac, BSDs and of course Linux.
Edited 2006-01-03 20:25
Member since:2005-07-23
Yeah, sorry I forgot to add the mention I was looking for a "modern" alternative 
keeping file permissions, being FAST, decent filename/volname length and so on... I'm not running a nuclear plant cluster, I'm just a "normal" user, I've come to "expect" those features from a filesystem though.
I know ... I can dream can I?
Member since:2006-01-03
I guess most Linux supported filesystems are portable in a sense. Their on-disk structures are documented and the algorithms they use are known, sou you could implement a driver for any one of them in another OS.
The real problem is the complexity. The complex ones, with good fetures and performance need a great deal of code to drive them, and more code means more dependencies on the kernel they were originally designed on/to. It is still possible to port them to another OS, but it means more work (e.g. XFS was ported to Linux from IRIX, I guess most of the code is new in Linux, but it can work with partitions created on IRIX).
That said, I remember reading somewhere how the cost and licensing for the Windows Filesystem SDK was the real impediment for cross-platform(OS) filesystem development on windows.
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Member since:
2005-07-23
This is a honest question from someone who does not know truly the mechanics of a filesystem. What about making a "portable" filesystem? What I mean by this is, we have reiserFS just sitting there. Would not it be possible to have someone (now, the question is who can handle that herculean task) figure a way to make the said filesystem run perfectly fine and natively (well it's still a hack, but you get the idea) under Microsoft Windows, and maybe Mac OS X?
What are the odds of that happenning?
I remember a project of "reiser driver" that used some development kit, however, I have never been able to make that work, I have not seeked further to run it properly, I think it was beyond my scope and it did not "behave" like a filesystem, meaning you would not be able to use it from "my computer" and such. That defeats my purposes somewhat.
http://rfsd.sourceforge.net/
Anyway, I'm just curious. I'm windowless since exactly one year and I'm not ever going back, however, I would be interested to see an "open" filesystem that can cross those boundaries. It would greatly ease the conversion of my friends.