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Next Windows to Have New Filesystem
ocipio writes: "Microsoft is currently planning a new filesystem. Its planned that the new filesystem will make searches easier, faster, and more reliable. Windows will also be less likely to break, and easier to fix when it does. The new technology will cause practically all Microsoft products to be rewritten to take advantage of it. Called Object File System, OFS will be found in the next major Windows release, codenamed Longhorn. More information can be found here at CNET."
It looks like BeFS with XML descriptions instead of MIME types. I think.
[o]_O
I hope any changes that happen to the file system also include the removal of the antiquated concept of file extensions for type association. Here is another thing that Mac does very well. Imbed the type of a file IN the file. Why not give me a version number and some way to know what program created it.
Back to the original topic, I can't wait for an OFS. Just for my MP3's. Figuring out which folder hierarchy to use for genre/group/album/track is a pain. Let the file system group them for me.
A speech...
Early versions of BeOS had a full object orientated file system and found performance was abysmal. This was from a company with no backwards compatibility to worry about and a small OS designed for speed.
In the end Be developed BFS which is basically a standard file system with support for indexes and attributes, an overall much better performing system with most of the benefits of an object orientated file system.
[)amien
The point of this new data store isn't necessarily faster searches, although that is one part of it. The idea is to have a common data storage mechanism, used by all programs.
The underlying technology is to replace the NTFS filesystem driver with SQL Server, with a few tweaks. SQL Server already supports using a RAW partition as a data store, so essentially you just have to move the transaction log and descriptive info for the databases into a specific area of the disk. Add a little bit of bootstrap code to ntldr, and slap the SQL Server stuff into the startup driver list, and it's a done deal.
The next step is creating an NTFS compatibility layer -- it would allow you to mount tables as drive letters or network shares. A lot of the information wouldn't be useful when viewed in that fashion, but it would give you a way to run older programs.
Once all your data is in a common data store and can be manipulated as such, it opens up a world of new possibilities. The change will be long and slow; no need to kid about that. It will take years for all the 3rd party programs (and even Microsoft's own apps) to catch up and start taking full advantage of it. It's the same situation Plug & Play was in back in 1995; it sorta worked sometimes, but you couldn't really take full advantage of it. But here in 2002, you really can expect to grab a piece of hardware and slap it in your box without hassles. It took some time, but it eventually paid off.
But... are you having trouble, as I did, thinking of ways to make use of this common data store? Part of that comes from the fact that we've been conditioned and trained to think of data storage in terms of files; it's hard to shift gears... to think outside of the "filesystem" box so to speak.
For one thing, I could see someone emailing me a project. Not some word documents, an excel spreadsheet, and a database zipped into a ZIP file; they just email me the project. When I get it, and open the message, the project opens up presenting me with the various documents (linked to the database of phone numbers for example), and a little yellow stickynote window that has the project leader's actual email text. I didn't have to deal with unzipping the data, rearranging it, then opening the documents separately. Since the "rows" are linked, they open and act as a unit until I tell them to do otherwise.
It gets better though... imagine if I could run a query such as "SELECT f.*, s.filename FROM Folder1 f INNER JOIN folder2 s ON f.datetime = s.datetime"
It can get even more useful because you now have full SQL syntax available to you for manipulating the filesystem, with queries that are lightning fast. Throw in some Stored Procedures, Functions, Views, etc and I can see real possibilities.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Unfortunately, Microsoft has exactly the wrong platform to implement these ideas on. The whole motivation behind this kind of thing is to simplify the software. Microsoft needs to be backwards compatible with 20+ years of cruft, and they have an abysmal record for writing clean, simple APIs.
This will probably end up being just another popular software engineering idea that ends up being superceded by new business plans later on. It will become yet another ossified layer in the lower sediment of their future OSes (see DCOM, etc.).
> They want to get their Digital Rights
.NET and start dropping the crufty Win16-contaminated Win32 API and x86 ties.
> Management Software to infest every aspect of
> their OS as possible.
Right. You keep throwing your FUD about while the rest of us looks at things seriously.
> Do you honestly believe that the benifit of a
> faster search is enough incentive to rewrite
> such a major part of the OS?
Short Answer: Yes.
Long Answer: Filesystems haven't changed much in the past few decades, but one of the things they have tended to gain is arbitrary metadata. Adding indexing to that metadata is a natural progression of that.
Now your filenames are just a part of the metadata you'll want to play with different views of the system, which suddenly becomes much much cheaper. Believe it or not, lots of users have trouble understanding the current basic filesystem concepts and using them to organise their data; well, now you can do it automatically for them.
Of course, you want your other stuff to make use of these new ways of looking at the system, especially when you're MS and are running out of new features to put in (come on, what are they going to add to Word XP now? A paperclip with speech recognition? Yet another GUI redesign?), so you want to do something that provides a visible difference (and maybe even an advantage) for those expensive upgrade programmes.
So, yes, I think they do have a very good reason for such a major change, like they had good reason to introduce '95 and start dropping DOS, or NT and start dropping Win16, or
The biggest issue I have with it is that it's going to be a bitch to use in other OS's. Hopefully they'll do detailed specs and stick to them fairly closely (ah haha), which will at least make it easier.
NTFS is a very solid filesystem and seems to recover problems well when something bad does happen. The only complaints I have are slow searches and reports. It takes a LONG time to find a file on a big volume, or try and do reports on file system usage. A good database system should speed that up tremendously.
The idea of having to rewrite the apps is interesting though. That tells me this is at least 5 years off, and longer before it would be used widescale. But I guess that makes sense, would you be the first shop to put your big fileserver on a new filesystem like that? Not me.
It is funny, we accuse Microsoft of using other people's ideas - but are we really any better? How much of Open Source development is really just reimplementations of other people's ideas?
When I read this article, I immediately had two thoughts:
Thought 1: "You know, they're right" Current file systems are outdated and are not really serving the needs of modern applications. Take for example, Microsoft Outlook (and Outlook Express). The programming teams for these pieces of software were forced to implement a "filesystem within a file" in order to achieve their design goals (I believe the files are called DBX files). Or take for instance, the Windows Registry, or, even better, the Gnome registry, GConf. Why do programmers have to implement dozens of different abstract filesystems in order to achieve their design goals? Simple, the present filesystems are not sufficient.
Thought 2: "Another way of attacking the Free Software Movement." By creating a new filesystem, Microsoft achieves many goals. First, they make Linux filesystem developers start from scratch again. I mean, the NTFS driver isn't even done, and this means we would have to start over. It gets even worse: From the sound of this article, it seems that OFS would be fundamentally incompatible with our conception of a filesystem today (possibly including features such as resource branches, GUID tags, and other metadata forks, ad nauseum). This would make it difficult to write a usable Linux driver for OFS. And finally, to top it off, my gut tells me that the POSIX file access calls would _not_ be sufficient to access such a rich filesystem. The introduction of a new, richer file access API by Microsoft would make writing cross-platform software much more difficult.
Microsoft can kill two birds with one stone here.
Ben
"We've been working hard on the next file system for years [since the early 1990's], and -- not that we've made the progress that we've wanted to -- we're at it again," Ballmer said.
While the Cairo project eventually resulted in Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, the file system work was abandoned because of complexity, market forces and internal bickering. "It never went away. We just had other things that needed to be done," Jim Allchin, the group vice president in charge of Windows development, told News.com.
Those other things most likely included battling "Netscape and Java and the challenge of the Internet and the Department of Justice," Gartner Group analyst David Smith said--issues that continue to persist today.
<snip>
The more important reasons for the renewed development effort, however, are strategic. If the plan succeeds, it will give Microsoft a huge technological advantage over the competition by making its products more attractive to buyers and giving large companies another reason to install Windows-based servers.
So if they hadn't been trying so hard to kill off Netscape, they would have had the time to spend on creating this. Something that seems to offer actual advantages to the user, and that would be "a huge technological advantage over the competition by making its products more attractive to buyers."
I wonder how many other genuine advances have been put on hold in the name of detroying someone else first.
Nope, no sig