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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?

#61

Post by e12e »

glabifrons wrote: post #52
Camillo wrote: post #39

A friend of mine uses ZFS on OS X. Apparently it works quite well. I imagine Linux support is good too, but I'm not sure about Windows. At any rate, I'm surprised the author didn't mention it.

I thought ZFS on OS X was read-only. Linux ZFS is still quite young, only supports a very early version of the fs, and can't be updated to the newest without serious reverse-engineering. As for ZFS on windows, I definitely would not hold my breath. I ran into the same frustration as the author and gave up. My notebook triple-boots Linux, Solaris 11, and OS X (I have no use for windows) and would be beyond thrilled to…

Assuming you have a separate zpool for shared storage, you could easily(?) script export/import on shutdown/startup?

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

#63

Post by lloeki »

e12e wrote: post #60
chao- wrote: post #59

I ran into yet another consequence of this situation today: In a Linux/Windows setup, I lost two hours of minor Photoshop work (i.e. stuff that was simple but annoying to recreate). I have generally found it safe to read from my NTFS drives in Linux (I avoid writing if at all possible). This time, however, when I went to load the result of my work back in Linux, it could not read the folder (Thunar reported some gene…

While technically hibernate (to disk at least) should unmount all filesystems - I'd be very wary of using hibernate (on either os) in a dualboot setup. Other than that - my experience of late has been that ntfs is safe both to read and write from linux -- but as I now encrypt all my filesystems, that doesn't really help (no bitlocker support). If I actually needed to dualboot -- I suppose a separate disk/partition wi…

> While technically hibernate (to disk at least) should unmount all filesystems

Not a chance. Hibernate is just like Suspend to RAM: freeze all processes but core kernel, blit RAM to disk (usually stored in swap) and send poweroff command straight to CPU. Of course it doesn't unmount anything, hence there are FS data structures live in RAM. Booting an alternate system and accessing a filesystem open on the other side is like mounting twice the same filesystem and writing to it. It will blow up on you.

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

#64

Post by coffeeaddicted »

gizmo686 wrote: post #37
codeka wrote: post #25

I think the author's use case is actually quite rare these days. I personally don't dual boot any more, much preferring to run other OSes in a virtual machine. Then I don't care what filesystems they use internally, all shared data is shared via the VM's interface anyway. I think that's the way of the future, not cross-platform filesystems.

I still duel boot, because I still can't stand the overhead of VMs. However, the tasks I need to do on Windows don't overlap with Linux, so it is not a problem, and Linux support for NTFS seems to be good enough (otherwise I could still make a deticated share partition in FAT.)

Especially when you do 3D stuff the overhead for a VM is no longer acceptable. So I'm also dual booting. I wasn't sure which FS would work well and made partitions with ext2, ntfs and fat32. But also using ntfs now as it just works good enough (no filesize limit and with ext2 I had the trouble that it wants fs-checks once in a while and if I booted just then into Windows I couldn't access it... also VS had once troubles with files on ext2 for some unknown reason).

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

#66

Post by e12e »

shurcooL wrote: post #21

I'm more upset there are no filesystems where I can organize files by applying labels to them, similar to how one can apply labels to email in Gmail.

I wonder how an implementation of this using extended attributes (xattr) would scale? I couldn't find much information on anyone doing this before, except one command line/emacs tool:

  https://github.com/chujoii/xattr-tag/

  I suppose adding a gtk-gui on top of this would be possible.
As well as an explanation (of sorts) for why there doesn't appear to be support for (x)attrs in GNU find:

  http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/wNWnxu100AzH1ItS2Dk5
"find" can filter based on -exec -- but there doesn't appear to be a simple command that will take a filename, an attribute (and optional value) and simply return 0 if found, other if not found (not that it should be hard to write, based off the attr-utilities code, for instance).

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

#67

Post by e12e »

lloeki wrote: post #63
e12e wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While technically hibernate (to disk at least) should unmount all filesystems - I'd be very wary of using hibernate (on either os) in a dualboot setup. Other than that - my experience of late has been that ntfs is safe both to read and write from linux -- but as I now encrypt all my filesystems, that doesn't really help (no bitlocker support). If I actually needed to dualboot -- I suppose a separate disk/partition wi…

> While technically hibernate (to disk at least) should unmount all filesystems Not a chance. Hibernate is just like Suspend to RAM: freeze all processes but core kernel, blit RAM to disk (usually stored in swap) and send poweroff command straight to CPU. Of course it doesn't unmount anything, hence there are FS data structures live in RAM. Booting an alternate system and accessing a filesystem open on the other side…

Ah, I was thinking of the Debian package for hibernate, that has custom scripts for unmounting selected file systems, from the help text:

  "If you have network shares or external devices that should be unmounted before suspending, list them here."
  "Unmounts any filesystems of the given types. This is most useful for network filesystems such as smbfs and nfs."
And afaik it is perfectly possible to add ntfs mounts to that list - but I don't think any program with open files on that mount would handle it gracefully (I belive the script will figure out which processes (if any) have open files and kill them prior to hibernation).

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

#68

Post by eropple »

coffeeaddicted wrote: post #64
gizmo686 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still duel boot, because I still can't stand the overhead of VMs. However, the tasks I need to do on Windows don't overlap with Linux, so it is not a problem, and Linux support for NTFS seems to be good enough (otherwise I could still make a deticated share partition in FAT.)

Especially when you do 3D stuff the overhead for a VM is no longer acceptable. So I'm also dual booting. I wasn't sure which FS would work well and made partitions with ext2, ntfs and fat32. But also using ntfs now as it just works good enough (no filesize limit and with ext2 I had the trouble that it wants fs-checks once in a while and if I booted just then into Windows I couldn't access it... also VS had once troub…

> Especially when you do 3D stuff the overhead for a VM is no longer acceptable.

I don't really find this true anymore. I run a retina MBP with VMware Fusion and VS2012 in Win7 (Boot Camp partition running in VMware) runs great, with very solid perf when running my OpenGL-based engine. Games run very well, too--the Steam selection on OS X is pretty poor, but I hate dual-booting, and the perf/quality tradeoff is very acceptable to me under virtualization.

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

#69

Post by richardwhiuk »

simula67 wrote: post #46
seldo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! So imagine how much slower it would be if the process involved getting the Linux community to agree with Microsoft on a standard. I realize it's not quite the bad old days anymore, but still.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't we standardize on one file system that has to be supported by all OSes out of the box and provides fairly good read/write speed with no artificial file size limits such as FAT32 and let innovation take place inside other file systems ?

FAT32 doesn't have an artificial file size limit - it has a file size limit which was perfectly reasonable when it was developed.

All filesystems have file size limits - it's not an artificial constraint, it's a design tradeoff in terms of the size of the metadata that the file system requires.

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

#70

Post by richardwhiuk »

The main reason I suspect is covered below, but the only time this is a useful thing is dual booting - the rest of the time network attached storage is the 'right' answer.

Personally, I'm glad to have left the time of dual booting operating systems behind me - it's a complete PITA. A Linux box with a bunch of disks under samba/ext4/lvm/mdadm is much more practical IMHO.

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