Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
yulian.kuncheff.com
Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#2exFAT [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/whatever repos for many distros) and it ships out-of-the-box on recent OS X installs [2].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT 1: https://code.google.com/p/exfat/ 2: http://www.macrumors.com/2010/11/11/mac-os-x-10-6-5-notes-ex...
EDIT
Yes, it is mentioned in the article. The article sucks. It does not define what "modern" features are of a filesystem, and the author clearly sets off with his end goal in mind ("there is no cross-platform FS") randomly removing FSes from the consideration for vague and hand-wavy reasons. This applies to several of the entries in his list. I mean the guy thinks UDF will do the trick, but exFAT is not good enough? Come on!
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#3exFAT [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…
Actually, exFAT is mentioned in the article.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#4Filesystems are these days entangled with virtual memory.
That joins to the kernel's world at the hip.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#5exFAT [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…
The first thing that comes in my mind is that we shouldn't expect something new and valuable in a near future becuase I believe that technology tends to be more focuced on the cloud filesystems rather than developing new portable filesystems where OS doesn't matter and everything is accessible. The common cloud filesystem might be the best option for such problems.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#6I 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 performance-impacting as the file system isn't worth the benefit.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#7About HFS: You seem to dismiss it a bit quickly. Trial versions of 'MacDrive' on Windows have always worked very solidly for me - if I were still using bootcamp I would pay for it.
However the bigger question IMO is: Do we really need native windows nowadays? If we ban windows into VMs and only use OSX + linux natively, HFS is indeed a solid option. The only thing hindering us so far from using windows VM-only was gaming and audio/video rendering software. Audio is very niche and the rest should soon be solved with increasing support for PCIe passthrough.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#8What 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.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#9About HFS: You seem to dismiss it a bit quickly. Trial versions of 'MacDrive' on Windows have always worked very solidly for me - if I were still using bootcamp I would pay for it. However the bigger question IMO is: Do we really need native windows nowadays? If we ban windows into VMs and only use OSX + linux natively, HFS is indeed a solid option. The only thing hindering us so far from using windows VM-only was ga…
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.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#10About HFS: You seem to dismiss it a bit quickly. Trial versions of 'MacDrive' on Windows have always worked very solidly for me - if I were still using bootcamp I would pay for it. However the bigger question IMO is: Do we really need native windows nowadays? If we ban windows into VMs and only use OSX + linux natively, HFS is indeed a solid option. The only thing hindering us so far from using windows VM-only was ga…
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.
> I know it's very hipster to hate Windows
I'm going to raise the level of meta-discussion here and say that it's even more hipster (my subjective assesment) to use that subjective assesment (hipster) of other subjective assesments (hate Windows).