WinFS Beta 1 Released Early

Mouldy Punk writes "Infoworld is reporting that WinFS Beta 1 has been released. The new relational file system for Windows is posted on MSDN Subscriber Downloads. This release is designed to offer developers a preview of WinFS capabilities. WinFS will be in beta when Windows Vista ships and will RTM afterwords. WinFS, when it ships, will be available for download for Windows Vista and possible support for Windows XP is being considered. The distribution mechanism for WinFS will be through an add-on download much like the .NET framework is today. Tom Rizzo also notes that there is a new blog dedicated to Win FS."

Comments

Sounds like an AS/400 to me

[msobkow]

Your description sounds an awful lot like what the AS400 team used to describe when I worked at companies that had good AS400 techies. It hybridized the mainframe-style contiguous file allocations with an integrated RDBMS that tracked the file information, much as the file information pages do with other file systems.

I find it interesting that so many "advances" other systems are making nowadays sound exactly like what the AS400 developers used to talk about. Using databases to store configuration information. Making the database an integral part of the OS. Virtualizing all storage so the system could shuffle files based on size changes and usage patterns to minimize head thrashing. Using wizards/forms for adding new software, changing configurations, etc.

I guess it's all considered "new" because so few people ever actually learned anything about the AS400 internals -- they just used them and counted on the system to do it's job properly.

So then what is Delete

[SuperKendall]

Ok, fine... you have just heaps of data, with a myriad of references to them.

What then is delete? How does a user distinguish between "remove an association from the blob of data" vs "remove this blob of data altogether". Should the blob automatically delete when you remove all metadata around it? If not, how will you find it again? If so, would you really want data vanishing just because you removed a keyword?

What does partial backup look like on a system? How can you have a combination of partial backups and know you have a whole? I can do that with a set of five directories. Let's say you tag a set of files with "project fred". But one small file, that you almost never care about, gets tagged with "project ferd". What good is the ol' Fred backup now?

At some core level these blobs of data that users place on a system need ONE meaningful location where they always "are". You need someplace where the file will always be, no matter what other associations you remove. You need somewhere you know it will be to assure yourself EVERYTHING you care about is backed up or moved between systems.

The perfection you seek can just as easily be obtained with files in directories that allow metadata on top of them and things like smart folders that are essentially queries over the user-defined and automatically extracted metadata. In fact I think that's what WinFS does anyway (just like OS X does today).

If you really like the system you describe nothing is stopping you from storing all your files in a DB and writing an explorer on top of that. Yet all this time, things like that have never taken off in the market.

Some things do not take off because the technology to make the useful has not yet arrived. But some things simply never take off because in practice they are not practical, and the filesystem as a full-fledged database with no default structure is one of those things.

Is Linux Trailing?

[hansreiser]

Reiser4 is technologically ahead of WinFS as a high performance storage layer, see www.namesys.com for details on its design. When you do this layering the way they did it, with the metadata stored in a layer above the FS rather than integrated into it, you lose a lot of performance while gain the advantage of successfully avoiding dealing with a host of technical issues. We are at least 5 years ahead of them technically in the storage layer.

That said, semantic enhancements matter more than performance, and it is better to do something semantically than to do nothing, and what Linux currently is doing is nothing.

The political support for adding semantic enhancements to Linux namespaces is mixed at best. I worry we will see that death by committee rules, and there will be no belief that each FS should try to innovate in its own way and compete with the others until one is proven the right solution. We are in serious danger of having MS implement bad technology, and Linux having to devote large amounts of resources to copying it in 5 years because we were late and chose to trail rather than lead. If the filesystems were free to compete in semantics, we could have one or several of the Linux filesystems leading them instead.

SQL and the relational model is fundamentally the wrong model for semi-structured data. See www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html for why.

Technically, I would worry much more about Apple. Dominic Giampaolo is very bright, and well funded. His chances of delivering on a good set of semantics are high because he and Jobs are very sharp, and neither of them is afraid to go where no one has gone before. Our chances of losing technically to Giampaolo and Jobs are high, because we are frankly not well funded, and a lot of us are complacent with semantics that are still pretty much the same as their father's Unix box.

So, in summary, I would say that we are still ahead but losing speed fast.

Thanks for your kind words Hisham.

Re:Is Linux Trailing?

[IamTheRealMike]

Hi Hans,

I've been watching the fun you've had on lkml and wanted to say don't give up! The work you and your team are doing is wondeful.

If anything, I think you should stop focussing on getting Reiser4 into the kernel and instead start demonstrating the applications of your ideas on semantics. In other words - put what you've built to work outside the kernel and prove to people that they cannot live without a next-generation filing system. It may even mean doing things you have never done before, like creating a new distro derivative.

I know how emotionally draining free software politics can be, we get a lot of that in my own autopackage project. If it gets too much rather than risk burn out, go off and do your own thing for a while. If you really do have a better way people will join your banner ;)

Re:Is Linux Trailing?

[mkro]

So true. I've also been reading the mailing list about this, and I can see Hans banging his head to the wall. I must admit the reasoning against implementing it -- why this-and-this should go in that layer and so on -- goes over my head, but I fear Hans will give up the same way Nemosoft Unv did regarding the PWC driver. Where I feel Nemosoft was wrong (and that solved itself quite nicely), I do not think we can afford losing Hans Reiser. Mike (The real one) has a good point about letting Reiser4 prove itself: Quite a few run non-standard kernels, all you need is something like BEST/KAT (Tenor?) to be successful, and the users will start applying pressure to get Reiser4 included by default.

Re:Is this really a file system?

[xtracto]

Have you ever seen a `My Documents' folder of someone who doesn't want to know about computers? No wonder they're always complaining that `it doesn't work.'

Yes, I have seen the "My Documents" folder of my mother's account. And as you say she has like 500 documents, including MS Explorer saved files AND their corresponding folders to hold images and misc binary files.

Yes I know that for me it is really stupid, as I tend to order every thing on its subfolder. For example let me tell you how I order my music: /mnt/Music/ /Anime /Metal /Dream Theater /Images and Words /... /OST /Boondock Saints /Kill Bill /... /Guitar /Classical /Shred /... ...

blah blah, you get the idea.

And, althoug I have heard the marvelous things that programs as iTunes, Win.Media Player, Winamp Media Library or even MusicMatch jukebox do to order music libraries I still cant get one that I find really useful.

Maybe for a lot of us that is THE way to do it, but see, my mother, as a lot of computer users is just a Biology teacher. She knows the minimum required to do what she NEEDS to do in her computer (Word, Excel, Power Point) you just need to understand that people does not have the model in their heads, I mean, the model of the file system, that you/we automatically recall when we open the Windows Explorer/Knoqueror/etc...

That attitude (of the most people you are talking about) to me is just like, for instance: ``I don't want to learn about strings and notes, I just want to play the guitar!''

Now, as an example, Think about the WinFS like Gmail, I really found the Gmail approach useful, more if I have thousands of mail. If you see, desktop search bars have gained a lot of acceptance these days.

That is because we no longer know what each file in our computer does, and we do not have to care. We need to get exactly the file that we need when we need it, and you can do that searching.

Now before ranting about the facts I gave, just take my last paragraph and replace the word file with mail and instead of a Microsoft technology you will have a Google technology, is it bad? no, I really dont care where all my files go, if I need to have some files classified then a Tag would be great. otherwise I just want the OS to identify it when I ask for it.

Re:Where's the Answer?

[petrus4]

At the application level, this, and this are two possible answers, or at least workarounds. On the filesystem level, this could be a possible workaround as well.

I agree however that it would seem people have been caught with their pants down in regards to WinFS though. The usual sentiment about it among Linux peeps from what I've seen is that it either isn't doable, or that it is, but that it'd be horribly slow.

Methinks a change in attitude is called for, however. This could very well be Bill's answer to the One Ring if he gets it out, which is presumably why Microsoft are trying to get a working release ASAP. Forget the coder bias for a minute here, and think about what the implications of this could be from the perspective of ease-of-use...and then think about what a battle we'd have converting people to Linux if we still don't have it when Microsoft does.

Longhorn was intended to be a Linux killer...but of all the elements I've seen, WinFS is the only one which could truly cause us problems...Especially when you consider how difficult back-engineering compatibility with such an FS would probably be.

As I said, I'm aware WinFS hasn't been taken seriously around here so far...but somebody needs to start to.