Next Generation Amiga File System

[Rodney]

If i remember correctly, Ben was talking about FFS and FFS2. He stated that both, are badly written and the whole archetecture needs an upgrade.

It is an OId file system, and ben sayign this doesnt surprise me. What is everyones feelings on this?

Ben also mention that a solution to the problem may be one of the linux type file systems. All i can think of is maybe ext3, RaesierFS or XFS.

What do you think about that?

If Ben is infact considering something OpenSource to superseed the Old FFS, then i think BeFS deserves a look. It obviously was the file system of its time, and now the OpenBeOS team have had an even better implimentation out for a while now. I would love to see this used as the AmigaOS file system, (not that i know a lot about it, but it sounds good)...

What do you think about FFS, and future choices of filesystems? Maybe there should be a range of filesystems to choose from?

I like the idea that the user, if advance enough, can tweek their OS to work the way they want, so a suit of filesystems would be great (not that i expect that happen, Hyperion have other things to do).

But whats your opinions on the whole thing?

[DethKnight]

I use ReiserFS now, best thing I've done for my suse stability.

Used ext3, it actually gave me less total free space (vs. reiserfs) after 2 separate identical installs.

Used XFS on rh7.3 , result unstable. may try again.

BeFS deserves another look, I briefly tried it once.

Waiting for IBM's JFS to mature for suse.

so any or all of the above would be welcome IMHO

[Argo]

Can we have a brief explanation of what the differnces of the FS are?

[CodeSmith]

IIRC (I only played around a bit with BeOS), the filesystem is journalled, which means that it's pretty resistant to power failures, crashes, etc.  It also supports any number of attributes for each file (on the Amiga you could have the file comments in an attribute, the filename on another, the date on another, and even make up your own ones), and you can even search and sort files based on those attributes.  Another cool thing is that the file type (yet another attribute) is based on mime types, so instead of using magic numbers or extensions, you assign a type to each file.  For example instead of having a file called lake.gif or scanning it for "GIF89a" at the beginning, you query its type attribute and get "image/gif".  Really neat stuff, and way ahead of anything anyone else has right now.  Rumour has it that the filesystem in the next big Windows release (longhorn?) will use something like that.

[Orgin]

As long as its not a case sensitive one

/Björn

[jd997uk]

@Rodney
The Amiga FFS is old and cranky, but, for now, it's going to have to stay.
Hyperion have said it's one of those things that do need replacing, but legacy reasons prevent it from being junked in favour of something more modern.

@Codesmith
M$ are definately going down the 'journalled FS' road with 'Longhorn', but I suspect it'll be a 'Longhaul' ™©® for them, as anything they do seems to be.

Much like Workbench itself, the FS will need sorting out in say the next OS revision (4.1/2), but for now we'll have to deal with waiting for our 80GB HDD's to validate after an error.............................................

;~)

-john

Rodney

I use JFS and it is outstanding.

In general I think we have two filesystem needs at least
to satisfy - the general user "dynamic" filesystem which
needs to be reasonably fast but allow flexibility how files can be assotiated with the filesystem. Esosteric stuff like filenames and path types spring to mind. I like the...

fulldevicename:directory/path/to/file.info

....style.

However here is where most OS miss a trick. This does
not have to be the only filesystem about in fact ( ignoring
swap/VM ) it pays to have two filesystems. One incredibly fast and compact filesystem for operating system essentials ( like logging, dumps and recovery ) which is not so user friendly ( not needed ) that applications can take advantage of too. This would probably be closely  allied to disk geometry.

Where do I seek inspiration for that one? MVS. It has
a high speed file system area for all I have listed above
and more and loads of user space filesystem types
from PDS/PDSE to HFS ( unix like ) filesystems.

The benefits are obvious. With time critical items like
logging from a spool you need to offload quickly and
not hold up tasks while you do so.

For non critical items ( like user data and third party apps ) they have a choice but more likely to use the user friendly but slower regime.

There are other combinatory filesystem projects but they
are considered an "evil compromise" because you sacrifice the performance of the low level filesystem for
being able to just have one FS! Well so far that is.

It will be interesting to see what Ben and crew come out with for 4.0 and later.

[Step]

Interesting, the BeFS was great but i would like to see a modern Amiga specifik filesystem.

On the other hand, if such an FS were complemented with XFS or similar, i would not mind a bit. Options are great.

[Rodney]

ext3 is basicaly ext2 (linux file system) with journaling. The only special feature of ext2 that im aware of is that it keeps data less fragmented, but thats not so special these days, as alot of file systems do this.

ResierFS is know for speed and its journaling.

XFS is the an IRIX file system. Know for incredible speed (on smaller files) thanx to (i beleive?) its tree like algorithms... (binary trees's etc?)

Im not up on the file systems, im only going on what i've heard, peoples opinions etc...

From what i heard, the BeOS file system was fantastic, aloud you to do things that most other people dream of. It also gave your applicatiosn that extra boost in speed and functionality (if they had anything to do with searching, or screwing around with the data on the disc).

I also am aware that, this cant happen atm, because OS4 relies heavily on those old 68k programs we know and love.

It'd be good though if at least one person at Hyperion or Amiga Inc was set aside to research to pros and cons... Then possibly put forawrd a design in when its ready to be coded...

But over all, a variety of file systems would be great. I think that could benifit a lot of people. Having several partitions for different files, with different sizes. Choosing the write file system coudl boost your performance and hence productivity. It could also have a large impact on that applications that are written. Could generate a whole new market out there!

Aw well, it'd jsut be grand for that scale of choice!

[Dagon]

jd997uk wrote

The Amiga FFS is old and cranky, but, for now, it's going to have to stay.
Hyperion have said it's one of those things that do need replacing, but legacy reasons prevent it from being junked in favour of something more modern.

I know it has been discussed whilom but I don`t remember what was the answer. So here I ask again.

Will the fs on AmigaOS 4.0 support large file names or it will have the limitation of the current fs

[sTix]

I have been using pfs3 for over two years now and i have NEVER had ANY problems
with it. Its very flexible, extremly safe and performs quite well too.

I would love to see a os4/ppc version of pfs3....      

[scholle]

I have been trying SmartFileSystem now for some
month and I like it a lot. Especially when you stack
a larger number of files into one directory, it really
FLIES compared to FFS. I have to admit that once a problem
occured with SFS, when there was a data block it could
not read any more. Since I did know how to deal with it
at first and lacked the time to really care, I ignored it
for some weeks and pressed the "Cancel" button everytime
it occured. This gave me no trouble. According to advice
from the SFS mailinglist, I saved my data to a new partition,
reformatted the old one and used it again. There was pratically
no data loss.

Alltogether, I found SFS fast and much more reliable than FFS.
I would be very glad if it was further developed to be used
with OS4.0.

[DethKnight]

slightly off topic but,

anyone else notice this ?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/28041.html

[miles]

I use SmartFileSystem too. I hope it will be able to be used in OS4.
I installed SFS after one last invalidated FFS and would never go back
to FFS.  SFS is faster and safer, does not invalidate your hard
drive, is still being developed and it's free :-)

[Orgin]

Quote from Ben Hermans about OS4:

"SFS will be included in a PPC native form for people who have been enjoying that up to now."

Source

/Björn