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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?

#81

Post by npsimons »

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…

It smells like Linux has been here! I can't STAND that guy or anything he touches, so I burned the folder just to be safe. You can thank me later."

This pretty much sums up Microsoft's reaction to Linux in a nutshell. It's precisely why articles like the one we are commenting on exist. The answer to the question that the article poses is "Because Microsoft hates competition and acts like a petty spoiled brat. Get back to us when they grow up."

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

#82

Post by NelsonMinar »

jrockway wrote: post #80
NelsonMinar wrote: post #79

My use case is external USB drives. A lot of comments in this discussion have said "use a network drive!". Which works in some scenarios, but brings a lot of complication.= over a USB drive. A $85 USB 2.5" drive carries a terabyte of data, fits in your pocket, needs only a single cable to use (and no external power), and transfers data faster than 100MBps ethernet. Or if you really care about speed, $40 gets you a 64…

Link to the $4 64GB USB3 drive?

Oops, typo, updated to say $40.

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

#83

Post by tytso »

The e2tools command line utilities should work just fine on OSX. I'm surprised no one has bothered to make OSXFUSE work with an ext3/4 driver, but it should be pretty simple. The libext2fs library which ships with e2fsprogs is pretty easy to make work with userspace applications. The the e2tools package uses libext2fs, and there have been FUSE drivers which use libext2fs. I can ask around see if there are some FUSE developers who could update an ext2/3/4 driver that works with OSX and Windows.

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

#84

Post by riobard »

Daegalus wrote: post #30
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.

While I try to do this often. My macbook even has Win8 and Ubuntu as VMs on it. Running Xcode or Visual Studio in a VM can get pretty laggy, even when I give the guest OS a considerable chunk of my host resources. I have an i7 920 and 16 gigs of ram, and I have about 50% to the guest, and Visual Studio and Xcode, along with simulators is pretty messy. Running a VM within a VM can do that. Its the only reason I do a t…

VM's IO performance is usually pretty bad. Try an SSD.

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

#85

Post by networked »

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.

The fact that file systems force us to organize data a into a set of named files in a fairly rigid hierarchy has been lamented since the 1970s by Ted Nelson (the man who, among other things, coined the term "hypertext") and others. However, it goes even further back than that with the critique of library indexing systems by Vannevar Bush in his seminal 1945 article As We May Think [1] that described the "Memex" as an alternative: a system that to today's eyes might look something like a PDF viewer with chained bidirectional links (think '90s web rings, only for book and magazine pages), which were called "trails".

There have been attempts to remedy those problems by both individuals like Nelson [2] and corporations like Be, Inc. [3] and Microsoft (which may or may not be related to the fact that Nelson's book Computer Lib / Dream Machines was very influential at early Microsoft and Microsoft Press even republished it). It truly is lamentable that Microsoft didn't bring one into the mainstream with WinFS [4].

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...

[2] http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6262736, http://www.xanadu.com/

[3] http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf, Chapter 5

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

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

#86

Post by shoki »

npsimons wrote: post #81
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…

It smells like Linux has been here! I can't STAND that guy or anything he touches, so I burned the folder just to be safe. You can thank me later." This pretty much sums up Microsoft's reaction to Linux in a nutshell. It's precisely why articles like the one we are commenting on exist. The answer to the question that the article poses is "Because Microsoft hates competition and acts like a petty spoiled brat. Get bac…

Microsoft's relationship with linux is actually a bit more complicated. It was a top 5 [1] contributor to the linux kernel in 2011 and a top 20 [2] contributor in 2012. The reason here is because linux virtualization is a big deal for Microsoft Azure.

Although the rational here is fairly clear: having good linux support for Azure helps Microsoft sell its cloud service. Having good linux support for Microsoft filesystems helps people move away.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/top-five-linux-contrib...

[2] http://www.geekwire.com/2012/surprise-microsoft-list-top-lin...

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

#87

Post by ersii »

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.

In BFS (Be(OS?) File System) you can add any kind of attribute to a file, for what I know.

Unfortunally, this isn't very helpful - since you need to run either BeOS or Haiku. If I'm not mistaken, there's a FUSE port of BFS to Linux as well.

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

#88

Post by c3d »

What about the native APIs? NTFS and HFS have their roots in non-Posix worlds. The basic operations are somewhat similar in all platforms (open file, read directory, ...) But the "modern" stuff is not standard, otherwise it would not be modern.

This is probably the reason only FAT fits the bill: it's a lowest common denominator that has so few features that it can appear "native" on all platforms.

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

#89

Post by magnawave »

wolf0403 wrote: post #62

Dare to use / test all different drivers on different systems from different vendors to read / write single piece of disk with some valuable data is really brave. Use NAS.

Indeed vary brave. Filesystems ARE NOT and never have been an API to exchange data between multiple OSes - they are a means to persist data efficiently for a single OS. Now if you don't mind breaking a bunch of the FS rules, sure compatibility hacks can always be written - but are you really sure each implementation is FULLY honoring the rules. I can guarantee you, for anything but the simplest filesystems, the answer will be "no". Hell, even FAT has implementation stragglers out there in the wild and its brain dead simple.

Use an API for cross platform sharing layered on top of a filesystem: Either a Virtual Machine sharing protocol (aka 9p virtio) or a real network protocol AFP/SMB/NFS. Anything else is taking your data in your own hands and is antithetical to the design of modern OSes.

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