An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate • Hacker News Board

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#51

Post by nyanpasu64 » Fri, Oct 27, 2023, 7:21 AM UTC

gecko wrote: post #18

andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #10

Question for the experts! Has NTFS changed much in... 20 years? Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) Apple replaced one filesystem with another in just the past few years, with apparently some very advanced new features. But NTFS is just... NTFS? Does NTFS today look anything like how it looked in…

It hasn't changed radically, but it has changed. Wikipedia actually has a nice write-up if you want the details, but support for symbolic links, transactions, and partition resizing are all things that have materially improved my life in the last ~5-10 years.

Unfortunately(?), Transactional NTFS is deprecated and Microsoft claims it may not be available in future versions of Windows.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#52

Post by Moomoomoo309 » Fri, Oct 27, 2023, 10:58 AM UTC

worewood wrote: post #49

gregschlom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds exactly like Everything ( https://www.voidtools.com/ ) - do check it out if you're not aware of this tool.

Everything is one of those things that are so obvious that it hurts it's not offered by default on operating systems (even Linux and Mac). Why go the effort to index the files in a filesystem when the filesystem IS an index in itself? Just query it directly

The locate or mlocate command does that on Mac/Linux.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#53

Post by chiph » Fri, Oct 27, 2023, 11:57 AM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #16

andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #10

Question for the experts! Has NTFS changed much in... 20 years? Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) Apple replaced one filesystem with another in just the past few years, with apparently some very advanced new features. But NTFS is just... NTFS? Does NTFS today look anything like how it looked in…

NTFS has gained support for a few features over the years, but it wasn't meant to evolve, much. Microsoft knew what they wanted from the filesystem and they wrote it to spec very early in its life. ReFS on Windows is where the changes are coming to. finally a 1st party filesystem which supports Copy on Write file cloning. a lot of core features of NTFS aren't supported on ReFS, so it's clearly not intended to be a re…

The recent interview with Dave Cutler mentioned this briefly. When the Cairo team was working on their object file system, they had no requirement to maintain backwards compatibility (which makes sense for new development). But they didn't build in a way to have in-place upgrades after it would have been released, either.

The Tukwila team, still working with the old codebase, had a rule that NTFS could be upgraded, but it had to either accept the old file system structures, or be upgraded in-place. And their code allowed for that. Relevant portion starts at about 2:10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsQBKkPj5Nc

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#54

Post by m-p-3 » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

Arrath wrote: post #39

electroly wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those features are over 10 years old. Time moves fast. Windows 7 was 14 years ago.

> Windows 7 was 14 years ago. Surely you lie..

And here I am, still trying to rid the corporation from Office 2010 from some users..