PFS3 is soon to become free and opensource

[olsen]

I was having this very same conversation just yesterday with Karlos.

I suggested UFS2 due to it's BSD licence too, or even the very sexy OpenBFS from Haiku.

The origins of BFS and SFS are not that different. The author of BFS wrote a book on his work, which served as more than inspiration for writing SFS. You can use SFS today, but OpenBFS would still have to be ported

[olsen]

ufs2 is a bit of a kludge and softupdate support is a pain in the ass. xfs requires a pretty heavy vfs layer and support. openbfs has know issues in order to be compatabile with beos (16bit runs). Personally I love and use JFS.

XFS also is a certified big iron file system. It's not just the vfs layer, XFS also eats memory like popcorn. If you really want to do something else with your desktop computer while it's merely tending to your files, you might want to choose a different kind of file system.

[olsen]

I've never even heard about PFS4. Can you point to any reference to these papers and/or ideas?

If you have any ideas post them here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=532591&atid=2163218

Now this is not specific to PFS, but a solid book on file system design and implementation I found very helpful is Dominic Giampaolo's "Practical file system design with the Be file system" (http://www.letterp.com/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf). Makes for a very good reference, and taught me a lesson in what not to implement. If it weren't for the book, we'd have journaling support in FFS today.