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Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

yulian.kuncheff.com

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Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#11

Post by cbhl »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

exFAT [0] is a great option. It's FAT32 updated with all the modern requirements. Surprised there was no mention of it! It's by Microsoft and is supported on XP and above (out of the box on Vista, update available for XP and Server 2003). It's surprisingly fast, robust, and all around a great OS to use for storing shared data. There's a free implementation available for Linux [1] (actually in the default apt/yum/what…

I do agree that exFAT is probably one of the better solutions out of what's available.

The author mentions journaling and extents (particularly important for his torrenting use-case to prevent fragmentation), which I feel are the way he defines "modern". exFAT also supports neither transparent encryption nor transparent compression.

Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#12

Post by bitwize »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

exFAT [0] is a great option. It's FAT32 updated with all the modern requirements. Surprised there was no mention of it! It's by Microsoft and is supported on XP and above (out of the box on Vista, update available for XP and Server 2003). It's surprisingly fast, robust, and all around a great OS to use for storing shared data. There's a free implementation available for Linux [1] (actually in the default apt/yum/what…

Yeah, I'm sure Linus, Theo, et al. will be totally willing to pay those patent license fees. Really quite small in the overall scheme of things when you get such a great file system in return -- yeah, NOT.

Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#13

Post by Yeroc »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

exFAT [0] is a great option. It's FAT32 updated with all the modern requirements. Surprised there was no mention of it! It's by Microsoft and is supported on XP and above (out of the box on Vista, update available for XP and Server 2003). It's surprisingly fast, robust, and all around a great OS to use for storing shared data. There's a free implementation available for Linux [1] (actually in the default apt/yum/what…

I think a lot of people would contend exFAT is NOT a great option by virtue of the fact that Microsoft holds patents on the filesystem and has (in the past) enforced those patents. So it's pretty unlikely that it's ever going to have great support on Linux.

Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#15

Post by theblazehen »

maratd wrote: post #9
DeepDuh wrote: post #7

About HFS: You seem to dismiss it a bit quickly. Trial versions of 'MacDrive' on Windows have always worked very solidly for me - if I were still using bootcamp I would pay for it. However the bigger question IMO is: Do we really need native windows nowadays? If we ban windows into VMs and only use OSX + linux natively, HFS is indeed a solid option. The only thing hindering us so far from using windows VM-only was ga…

I prefer things vice versa. I know it's very hipster to hate Windows, but if I stick OS X and Linux into VirtualBox, I can then use Samba on Linux and OS X already supports SMB. Now everybody can talk to each other.

What's wrong with Windows in a VM? Linux can share the files using samba as well.

Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#16

Post by shurcooL »

seldo wrote: post #6

I think the real, but unhelpful answer is "supply and demand". Most filesystems are used by only one operating system at a time. If two operating systems need to share files, they're usually on different machines, so it's simpler to copy the files or provide a network interface to them, rather than share disk-level access. Getting different OS makers to standardize (and therefore slow innovation) on something as perf…

Is the innovation fast now?

Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#17

Post by drivebyacct2 »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

exFAT [0] is a great option. It's FAT32 updated with all the modern requirements. Surprised there was no mention of it! It's by Microsoft and is supported on XP and above (out of the box on Vista, update available for XP and Server 2003). It's surprisingly fast, robust, and all around a great OS to use for storing shared data. There's a free implementation available for Linux [1] (actually in the default apt/yum/what…

FUSE only? Proprietary with no spec released? I wanted to like it, but it's also easy not to.

Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#18

Post by drivebyacct2 »

seldo wrote: post #6

I think the real, but unhelpful answer is "supply and demand". Most filesystems are used by only one operating system at a time. If two operating systems need to share files, they're usually on different machines, so it's simpler to copy the files or provide a network interface to them, rather than share disk-level access. Getting different OS makers to standardize (and therefore slow innovation) on something as perf…

>it's simpler to copy the files or provide a network interface to them

Ding ding ding. Much easier to have a Samba server then try to make a FS work across multiple OSes. That having been said, I haven't really had that much issue with using NTFS.

Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#19

Post by timdorr »

cbhl wrote: post #8

What the author really wants is network-attached storage. Find a cheap/old box, put your favourite flavour of Linux on it, add a few TB hard drives, and run Samba. If performance is an issue, use a mobo with SATA 3 controllers and a few gigE ports, and add additional network daemons for more "native" networked filesytems (NFS, AFS, etc.) as necessary.

If he doesn't want to spend any money on hardware, perhaps he could do the same with a Virtualbox VM? That can be hosted on all three of his OSes. I don't know about performance, though.

Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

#20

Post by drivebyacct2 »

maratd wrote: post #9
DeepDuh wrote: post #7

About HFS: You seem to dismiss it a bit quickly. Trial versions of 'MacDrive' on Windows have always worked very solidly for me - if I were still using bootcamp I would pay for it. However the bigger question IMO is: Do we really need native windows nowadays? If we ban windows into VMs and only use OSX + linux natively, HFS is indeed a solid option. The only thing hindering us so far from using windows VM-only was ga…

I prefer things vice versa. I know it's very hipster to hate Windows, but if I stick OS X and Linux into VirtualBox, I can then use Samba on Linux and OS X already supports SMB. Now everybody can talk to each other.

? It's super duper easy to run a Samba server in Linux.
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