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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?

#101

Post by archivator »

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…

Symlinks. Put all three folders under a common parent. Then, put symlinks inside your Dropbox pointing to the relevant parts of the project.

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

#102

Post by qu4z-2 »

inquist wrote: post #97
lloeki wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

You can suspend-to-disk just fine, as long as you remember to always boot back into the OS you suspended from. I guess suspend-to-ram forces you to do that (and my preferred option anyway), but I just wanted to make sure it was clear that there's nothing unsafe about suspend-to-disk as long as you don't let another OS get its grubby fingers on your mounted disk.

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

#103

Post by dhruvmittal »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #18
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.

Generally, Linux has pretty great support for reading and writing on ntfs (I want to say ntfs-3g is usually a default on most distros?), but Windows can't natively read ext3/ext4/btrfs. It's doable, though, with programs like diskinternals linux reader and explore2fs. However, these programs tend to be read-only, forcing you to copy files across to a windows-readable fs.

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

#104

Post by npsimons »

shoki wrote: post #86
npsimons wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 filesyst…

I'm aware of Microsoft's Linux kernel contributions; I've also been around long enough to remember the woes of NTFS compatibility, CIFS compatibility, the Halloween documents, the "virus" accusations, the SCO debacle, and not least of all relevant to this current conversation, the fact that exFAT is basically banned from an FLOSS implementation due to onerous licensing and software patents.

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

#105

Post by Shorel »

e12e wrote: post #67
lloeki wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

You can't change Windows code to 'add ntfs mounts to that list'.

Windows 8 will in fact do hibernation when you think you have turned off the computer.

Bottom line: You can't dual boot safely with Windows 8.

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

#106

Post by glabifrons »

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #73
glabifrons wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Linux ZFS is still quite young, only supports a very early version of the fs Which implementation are you talking about? See https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/stable . Zpool version 28 is old now? The only implementation of 31-33 is in Solaris! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Comparisons

http://zfsonlinux.org/ They no longer list the versions on the front page. Last I saw the page was only a few months ago (max) and you couldn't even create a filesystem yet (you could create a zpool and zvols). I remember reading on that page the zpool and zfs versions implemented at that time, and they were way back.

And yes, I am using Solaris for comparison... I mentioned that I'm triple-booting with Solaris in the post you replied to.

I'm glad so see the development has caught up, but it is still quite young.

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

#107

Post by cbhl »

timdorr wrote: post #19
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.

No, that's silly, because it presents a chicken-and-egg problem -- where would you put the Virtualbox VM if you don't have a filesystem that all three OSes can read?

I was very intentional in suggesting it be a separate physical device.

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

#108

Post by maratd »

DeepDuh wrote: post #24
maratd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, the thing about OSX is that it is heavily reliant on in house media codecs and drivers that I find haven't been virtualized very successfully so far. Furthermore, I find that the (paid) virtual host desktop solutions on OSX are much better in terms of performance and integration than their windows counterparts - probably because of higher demand, possibly also because of architectural reasons. But maybe you hav…

> Does XCode including iOS simulator work well?

Yes.

> Is the performance acceptable?

It is for the above. Not so much for anything demanding.

You're kinda missing my point. If I wanted to work in OS X, I certainly would never virtualize it. If I occasionally need to check a website or see how it would look like on an iPhone, then virtualization is a good option.

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

#109

Post by coffeeaddicted »

eropple wrote: post #68
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting. I have to admit I haven't tried it for a while, because it was always so bad in the past. But I'm also on Linux and not on MacOSX, maybe the situation there is better.
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