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Windows on Btrfs

lilysthings.org

141–150 of 286 posts

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Such projects have long existed, but I suspect there's a lack of interest. It's a difficult technical problem with a narrow usage niche. You need somebody who wants both Windows an…

Back in the day, and I mean like mid-late 90's, you could actually install the Linux kernel, files etc., straight onto a Windows FAT partition and boot into it. Not exactly what was being asked for, but a weird old fact I'd forgotten about.

There was a distribution called WinLinux that did this, iirc. Installed like a normal piece of windows software. Was my first foray into unices when I was a young kid. There were some fun games in that distro!

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#142

Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Surely, given the Linux native file system is open source, adding the ability to mount ext4 partitions natively should be something people can add to Windows? I have seen third party…

ext2fsd and ext2ifs do exactly that, although neither of them is very actively maintained (but do they really need to?)

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> There is no way to have btrfs caps insensitive. There is no way to make NTFS case insensitive either, it being case insensitive in Windows is a Windows implementation detail.

Does that mean windows could make any file system case insensitive?

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#144
post #15

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.

I think nothing these days can perform worse than NTFS. I’ve been using Windows on my corporate issue laptop and anything that includes disk IO is a huge pain.

On Windows, I can enumerate a directory that accidentally got millions of files perfectly fine without the system itself breaking and with results being returned incrementally.

On Linux/ext4, it takes an eternity for an enumeration to even start returning results and the entire OS gets stuck on IO while doing so.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#146

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 b…

I was wondering about that too, specifically how ZwCreateFile and other file i/o functions would work. But if they're using a file system filter then it's not an issue. I'm curious where \\Device and \\DosDevices goes, considering Windows device files and their symlinks are there. I guess they just put them in under /?

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#147
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Such projects have long existed, but I suspect there's a lack of interest. It's a difficult technical problem with a narrow usage niche. You need somebody who wants both Windows an…

Wanting to dual-boot sometimes isn't that rare, surely. And local storage for documents remains popular too. It seems to reflect the reality that serious Linux development effort has been very server-focussed for a long time.

For me dual boot has ended the day VMWare and Virtual Box became good enough, that was around 2010.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#149

> I forgot to take screenshots but it was the AMD stuff from the Microsoft Store failing to launch. What does AMD mean here? AMD the processor company? I don't see how that is related to changing the filesystem.

GPU or chipset drivers, maybe?

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#150

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

Unless it supports the transactional filesystem API, Windows Update won't even work in the first place. ReFS boot in fact is affected by the same issue at this time.

I thought that was deprecated since Windows Vista or 7.
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