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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?

#41

Post by shurcooL »

sdrinf wrote: post #32
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.

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 just an example.

Finally, I think a great way to organize files is by time created/modified. If you exclude the system or program generated files. Quite often I just want to find a file that I know I saved a few days ago (but no idea in which folder).

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

#42

Post by shurcooL »

mbell wrote: post #31
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.

You can do this on a mac (Finder labels are stored in HFS+ metadata).

To some degree, yes, but the UI for it is too awkward to be usable. It's not as first class citizen as creating folders and putting files in folders.

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

#43

Post by bnegreve »

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.

Well, it isn't really a matter of file system since it is possible to implement "tags" on any FS using links. (i.e. by creating directories named after tags and by populating these directories with links to the actual files.)

Therefore what you need isn't a new file system but a file system browser that allows you to specify a (set of) file(s) using tags.

Considering how easy it would be to do just this using fuse, I'd guess some Linux folks already tried this, does anyone know about projects in this line?

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

#45

Post by dredmorbius »

Let's clarify the author's use case: a multi-boot system for which he's looking for a universally compatible filesystem.

There are various reasons why this doesn't exist, at least not beyond compromise solutions such as vfat. A transfer partition and use of archive formats would largely suffice.

The larger problem though is expecting to be able to manage the same storage on a multi-boot system from multiple operating systems. It's one of the reasons that multi-boot is a poor alternative to virtualized systems.

The author could configure his alternative OSes as VMs, and transfer files via virtual networking, either via transfers (scp, etc.), or via mounted networked filesystems (CIFS/sambafs, NFS). Compatibility issues are handled by the networking protocols (or by using archive formats), and simultaneous access to multiple environments is available.

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

#46

Post by simula67 »

seldo wrote: post #26
shurcooL wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the innovation fast now?

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 ?

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

#47

Post by csense »

What about network filesystems?

They can be quite fast if you aren't running them over a physical network, such as between host and VM operating system on a single physical machine.

My preferred solution to your use case would be to run Linux in a virtual machine, configure the VM platform separately in each host OS to give the guest direct access to a dedicated raw partition in ext4 or any other Linux-compatible format, then serve Samba or some network filesystem to the host from the guest. (Of course, if Linux is your host, you can just mount the dedicated partition directly from the command line or fstab.)

Back when Windows was my main OS, I liked Colinux [1], a port of user-mode Linux [2] which allows you to run the Linux kernel as a native Windows binary.

But nowadays my first recommendation would be Virtualbox. You could also try qemu, it might have better Mac support.

[1] http://www.colinux.org/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_mode_linux

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

#48

Post by lmm »

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 ?

UDF is pretty much that

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

#49

Post by inopinatus »

I've been using Paragon's native NTFS for OSX and it's been fast and robust enough under the modest loads of small office file sharing.

The author of this article seems to have mistakenly dismissed their stuff as FUSE based, which it doesn't seem to be. It's also cheap.

They also have HFS for Windows, haven't tried it even though it came free with the NTFS for OSX driver.

Not associated with Paragon in any way, just a customer.

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

#50

Post by tga »

This is a problem, but triple booters are numerically an edge case.

Rather, what file format do you use on your portable drives when you use all three operating systems on different machines in different scenarios (say Windows at work, OS X at home, Linux on servers)?

I'm sure that starting a virtual machine to share EXT4 drives over the host-only network works (if you have the option of installing VirtualBox everywhere), but I'd be weary of network file system limitations and issues and overall bad performance.

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