Windows on Btrfs • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#51

Post by overthrow » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:04 PM UTC

garaetjjte wrote: post #20

kitsunesoba wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some amount of that might be coming from Windows Defender and similar, but yeah NTFS isn't exactly a speed demon.

Nothing particularly wrong with NTFS, it's Windows filesystem architecture that is slow.

I'd love to see a benchmark of NTFS on Windows vs NTFS on Linux. Unfortunately ntfs-3g uses FUSE so right now it's not really a fair comparison.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#52

Post by flatiron » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:04 PM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #43

qbasic_forever wrote: post #16

Haha wow that is so ridiculous it's awesome. Seeing both the Linux root and Windows root with Program Files living right next to usr, etc. is _wild_. Very cool hack!

Given there's now native NTFS support in the Linux kernel, you could also do that that the other way around.

I guess that paragon driver got merged. I remember the pull request…

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#53

Post by klodolph » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

jasoneckert wrote: post #49

I've always thought filesystem compatibility between OSes should be a priority. Moreover, I've never understood why Microsoft developed ReFS instead of adopting ZFS.

Yeah, so the semantics of the filesystem APIs on Windows is very different, so you're not going to easily port filesystem code to Windows from other operating systems. ZFS is CDDL and that won't fly on Linux. Linux filesystem code is GPL2 and that won't fly on macOS. Licensing is a bitch.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#54

Post by userbinator » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

It's good to see projects like this which basically confirm what we know about the modularity of the filesystem layer in Windows. In fact, the IFS API that enables this has been there since MS-DOS 4:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installable_File_System

Although I'm sure that Windows would have some issues with that as XP was the last version that let you boot off of FAT32

I remember it being not too difficult to boot Vista and 7 from FAT32, although the official installer wouldn't let you.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#55

Post by userbinator » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:06 PM UTC

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #46

Speaking of Windows storage drivers, years ago, I managed to get Windows to boot and run entirely in RAM using some fairly obscure tools from the reboot.pro forums. I always wanted to have an immutable Windows system that I could manage like cattle. Unfortunately, setting up such a system was extremely complicated and a manual process. I am aware that Windows now has a driver called UWF that functions a bit like an o…

WinPE does that.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#56

Post by AshamedCaptain » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:06 PM UTC

csdvrx wrote: post #10

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #8

I am sure this will break the second time you run Windows Update.

> I am sure this will break the second time you run Windows Update. Then you are confidently wrong, because Windows Update rarely (if ever) touches the bootloader, while this is the main innovation of the WinBTRFS project.

Until the day it touches it and replaces your selection from the UEFI firmware. Or repartitions the recovery partition. Or decides to move the recovery partition from the beginning of the disk to the end of the disk. All stuff I have personally seen Windows Update do.

I am sure your custom bootloader will not be overwritten. All types of hell can happen, borking the entire installation -- and your bootloader will still be perfectly fine.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#57

Post by dboreham » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

Rimintil wrote: post #47

speed_spread wrote: post #3

Too bad the article doesn't talk about performance vs NTFS. Any quick and dirty comparative benchmark would have been nice. But then again, If BTRFS had been slower than NTFS it could have been due to a suboptimal (re)implementation.

This is due to file system filter [drivers], not the file system. NTFS is perfectly fine and performs well.

Hmm. I thought the problem was that NTFS is not particularly fast at file creation. Generally not a problem, except for the folks who wrote the npm tooling which generates 10,000 files in the blink of an eye.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#58

Post by overthrow » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

jasoneckert wrote: post #49

I've always thought filesystem compatibility between OSes should be a priority. Moreover, I've never understood why Microsoft developed ReFS instead of adopting ZFS.

Probably license issues - same reason Linus won't add ZFS to the linux kernel. https://itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-zfs/

If Linus is afraid of Oracle, MS should definitely be afraid

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#59

Post by flatiron » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:10 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #28

kitsunesoba wrote: post #5

Interesting, I would've expected more Windows software to just assume NTFS with some fallbacks for (ex)fat given how there haven't really been any other options for quite some time. How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent reason. Curious if something similar is possible with ZFS.

File systems are drivers and user space software shouldn’t really see the difference.

There is no way to have btrfs caps insensitive. So some software (poorly coded) could have capitalization issues that would not appear in NTFS that would in btrfs. But other than that I believe you are right (barring utilities specifically designed to interact with FS attributes)

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#60

Post by josephcsible » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 11:17 PM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #43

qbasic_forever wrote: post #16

Haha wow that is so ridiculous it's awesome. Seeing both the Linux root and Windows root with Program Files living right next to usr, etc. is _wild_. Very cool hack!

Given there's now native NTFS support in the Linux kernel, you could also do that that the other way around.

I wonder which direction causes more breakage for the non-native OS.