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Microsoft Announces ReFS, a New Filesystem For Windows 8
bonch writes "Microsoft has shared details about its new filesystem called ReFS, which stands for Resilient File System. Codenamed 'Protogon,' ReFS will first appear as the storage system for Windows Server and later be offered to Windows clients. Microsoft plans to deprecate lesser-used NTFS features while maintaining 'a high degree of compatibility' for most uses. NTFS has been criticized in the past for its inelegant architecture."
That might be motivation for creating ReFS. Third party NTFS drivers finally became mature enough to safely read/write the file system... so lets create a new undocumented filesystem and make data exchange between other OSes a PITA again. It also means WinFS is completely dead and never coming back.
Or maybe, just maybe, his post is actually a joke, wherein he copy/pasted the list of features being dropped (see paragraph 5 in TFA), claiming they were the advancements.
But no, conspiracy theories are much more fun.
Respect?? That's absolutely terrible.
A modern journalling filesystem should not experience any corruption after a crash, because journal recovery is supposed to keep data structures consistent.
Not only that, but NO filesystem, journalling or not, should cause a kernel crash if it is corrupted.
Microsoft has done one thing well, and that is to lower the expectations of their users so far, that what should have been a few second journal recovery turned into a big outage and manual recovery of a massively corrupted filesystem, and that gains them "Absolute respect".
I use linux (arch linux) on all my machines. I agree with you that this will break interoperability, but even I (a die hard linux user) recognize that Microsoft has a right to try to improve their file system. NTFS has been around a long time (version 1.0 released in 1993). Sometimes laying an old project to rest and starting new is the right choice. This does not mean that they are doing this to break "system rescue cd" or some other live linux environment.
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God