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State Of The Filesystem

Posted by timothy on from the upward-tilting-trend dept.

Skeme writes "Have you heard of Plan 9 or Reiser4 but don't know much about them? Are you curious about the improvements free software is making to its filesystems in general? Read my summary of the current developments in the filesystem: namely, what improvements we can expect (a lot), and what Linux and the BSDs can do to improve on the filesystem."

1 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How about fixing the current filesystems?! by spaic · · Score: 5, Informative
    From the Linux-ntfs FAQ

    3.8 How was the Linux NTFS Driver written?

    Microsoft haven't released any documention about the internals of NTFS, so we
    had to reverse engineer the filesystem from scratch. The method was roughly:
    1. Look at the volume with a hex editor
    2. Perform some operation, e.g. create a file
    3. Use the hex editor to look for changes
    4. Classify and document the changes
    5. Repeat steps 1-4 forever
    If this sounds like a lot of work, then you probably understand how hard the
    task has been. We now understand pretty much everything about NTFS and we
    have documented it for the benefit of others: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ntfs/index.html

    Actually writing the driver was far simpler than gathering the information.