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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?

#91

Post by weazy »

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've been in a similar situation as the OP. I was trying to share an external USB drive with Linux, OS X and Windows 8 with my git-annex archive on it. Turns out exFAT doesn't support soft links (git-annex needs them to work), which is a feature I think should be supported by any modern filesystem. In general, you're shit out of luck with git-annex os interoperability :/.

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

#92

Post by Daegalus »

nitrogen wrote: post #78

I triple-boot my desktop and laptop (Linux, W7, XP), and have a pair of large NTFS partitions to share data (including my Steam library using symlink trickery) between all three operating systems. The downside is that the open source version of ntfs-3g is slow (still faster than using a VM), and its allocation strategy seems to cause extensive fragmentation. To those wondering why VMs are insufficient, if you have wo…

This is kinda the situation I am in. But I stated that in the first few paragraphs of my post.

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

#93

Post by Terretta »

networked wrote: post #85
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…

Bill Gates' recent Reddit Ask Me Anything he said his biggest regret was not doing WinFS.

Q: What one Microsoft program or product that was never fully developed or released do you wish had made it to market?

Gates: We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will remerge since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding.

-- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...

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

#95

Post by scythe »

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…

How about a little backwards-compatible patchkit for UDF that makes it more friendly for HDD storage use? That would require a lot less work to port than something like ext4, and if it wasn't available for a certain OS, it wouldn't be -too- big of a deal.

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

#96

Post by wsh »

I respectfully disagree with the author's conclusion.

There are at least two filesystems, intended for situations where several computers share block-level access to the same disks over Fibre Channel or iSCSI, that are truly cross-platform, allowing volumes to be used, simultaneously if desired, from computers with different operating systems.

Quantum's StorNext File System is available for Linux, for Microsoft Windows, and for several UNIX systems, including OS X, where it's bundled with the OS and known as Xsan. SGI's CXFS ("clustered XFS") is similarly compatible.

Both of these filesystems are modern, in the author's sense that the filesystem does not impose a practical limit on file or volume sizes.

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

#97

Post by inquist »

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…

Yeah this bit me recently, as I was hibernating my linux system but sometimes booting into Win7. Ended up having to reformat linux partitions, some inode information got messed up. e2fsck found and 'corrected' some errors which really didn't help at all. Lesson learned, as long as I'm dual booting, will stick with s2ram!

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

#98

Post by inquist »

shurcooL wrote: post #41
sdrinf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite sure if you really want that: open your favorite shell, and count the number of files in your data directory; then multiply it by, say, 2 seconds each -would you like to spend that time on organization, or rather making money? (obviously you can apply the same label to multiple files, but you still need to figure out what belongs to where). Personally, I gave up on manual organization of my file system last…

I only want to manually apply labels only to some files/folders. I have some parts of the same project spread out through 3 folders: not in Dropbox, in Dropbox, in Public subfolder of Dropbox. It'd be really nice to have a unified view on those things. As in apply 'Dropbox' or 'Dropbox/Public' labels to some files. I know Dropbox has shared links, but I don't want to have to create and manage those all the time. It's…

Save everything in one folder. Optionally set up (symbolic) links in other locations.

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

#99

Post by keeperofdakeys »

scythe wrote: post #95
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…

How about a little backwards-compatible patchkit for UDF that makes it more friendly for HDD storage use? That would require a lot less work to port than something like ext4, and if it wasn't available for a certain OS, it wouldn't be -too- big of a deal.

UDF already has a HDD mode, it isn't just a CD filesystem. It even has support for POSIX permissions, hardlinks, softlinks, and most other features of modern filesystems. I've had Windows Vista, 7, Linux and XP (read only) use it successfully on a USB (however you need to be more paranoid to always unmount it then FAT). I've never got my UDF dicks to work on OSX however.

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

#100

Post by keeperofdakeys »

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…

Unfortunately for being a closed filesystem, I can't trust the linux implementation until its quite mature. It also won't be available in the kernel, which really hurts performance (important in an age with fast devices like USB3). As such this is not an option for linux users.
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