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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."
After my initial tests, I must say that ReFS is incredible advangement. ReFS supports named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes and quotas. It is basically all the best filesystems compiled into one.
Not only is this good for Windows system, but overall network architecture.
This is a bad idea.
Now we can count on some guy named 'Hans Resilient" to be tried and found guilty of murder.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
I can't say that I've ever used any of the NTFS features they're planning to drop.
I do wish Windows had a sane soft-link system like *nix does; I've yet to run into an application that automatically dereferences a .lnk when opening it. You have to futz around with opening the link manually, reading it's redirect, and then opening THAT instead. Very crude and ugly.
But more to the point, I didn't see much about what might be NEW with this file system, only what's OLD and being discarded.
Mind you, some basic feature cleanup never hurt anyone. But if that's the case, why not NTFS2 instead of a marketing buzzword?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
All we need is another MS-specific filesystem to cause compatibility headaches.
After my initial tests
Wait, what? From the article:
Officially named ReFS — for Resilient File System — the new file system will be made available via a staged “evolution,” according to a January 16 post on the “Building Windows 8 blog.
So you're saying something that was just announced and will be made available via a staged evolution has already been tested by you? Impressive!
It is basically all the best filesystems compiled into one.
Thanks for summing it up for me there, bud. I didn't realize it was the greatest goddamn filesystem I could imagine, why didn't you just say "Imagine what your dream filesystem will be able to do, this is it." I wonder though, will it have the homicide capacity of ReiserFS?
This reminds me of my initial tests of cold fusion. I must say that cold fusion is incredible dvangement. Cold fusion supports providing us with unlimited power from a glass of water, it prints money, it gives the user eternal life, it allows the user to travel faster than the speed of life and -- when activated -- attractive women jump out of the core reactor demanding money shot after money shot.
My work here is dung.
Dropping support for compressed folders and hard links? I use those features all the time. Especially when you troubleshoot a server with a subfolder containing 12GB of log files, and have no direction or policy about what to do with those old log files, you could safely enable compression on the folder and they magically take up less space.
Today, NTFS is the most widely used, advanced, and feature rich file system in broad use.
If this is true...it's a very sad world we live in...
1) which problem does this solve ?
2) if the answer at #1) is not "null", then how monkeyproof is it ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
There's already no Linux driver for it... so does that mean you're going to switch? And if someone makes a Linux driver will you switch back to not using it?
If you're married to "Hans Resilient", you'll want to start running now.
Sounds like they're due for a refresh so they can get some new patents on their filesystem to make sure all the device makers need to continue to pay them money.
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.
Maybe he means something like with SecureBoot, he will never be able to run linux again, so not having a filesystem driver won't matter, or something like that, so he's not switching?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I mean i am not going to use this new FS. NTFS is mature enough for me, for Win7 and linux.
I'm not a filesystem guru. I stick to programming in the application space mostly. But I have noticed a large time discrepency compiling a large project using EXT4 vs NTFS. EXT4 being multiple times faster then doing the same compile on an NTFS. My question now is, will ReFS bring those times up to similar values?
PS. Also looking at the dropped support for short names, i think quite a few server batch files will be broken.
Note the collaboration between this, and numerous other "contributors" between extremely verbose first posts submitted within the same minute
It's called "being a subscriber". Since you don't even know that we can all just assume you've not ever been one and are just a leech.
As for "being paid", I don't know that many people are paying to have humorous articles posted to Slashdot.
You did realize his post was humor, right? It was not to subtle for you to comprehend, right?
Oh.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, Apple, it looks like you'll be the last major OS still running a terribly out of date file system. Ditch HFS+!
I don't get why they don't go with EXT4 or something in that fashion.
"Microsoft plans to deprecate lesser-used features" --- such as the reasonable level of compatibility that has started to show up in non-Microsoft implementations of NTFS over the last couple of years. We may be assured that ReFS is a patent minefield.
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Damn right. I'm not going to use the hell out of it!
.
I have to wonder how much of the pre-release ReFS hype will prove to be true in the coming years.
All the file utilities for both Mac and PC and how you handle these different systems including forward/backward compatibility, Parallels, VMWare, Backup software, hard drives and tape devices will all go through teeth nashing debugs as we try to get everything to work with a new file system.
That may be OK when you are an IT professional.
For someone who "just wants it to work" there is likely to be lots of surprises ahead.
But more to the point, I didn't see much about what might be NEW with this file system, only what's OLD and being discarded.
Mind you, some basic feature cleanup never hurt anyone. But if that's the case, why not NTFS2 instead of a marketing buzzword?
The article hints in various areas that they are restricted by maintaining a high level of compatibility. ReFS is merely a transitional FS from NTFS, and as an unfortunate result it carries some of that burden with being compliant to a high compatibility standard. Part of me thinks this may be the "Vista" of file systems (much of what caused Vista to be awful was due to extreme efforts to maintain compatibility), but I will be critically optimistic about it, given the changes it advertises.
On a side note, the original MSDN blog confuses me on a couple things, namely their statement on deduplication. While they say the ReFS itself does not natively incorporate deduplication, but - like NTFS - will permit 3rd-party support of it, why is it that people have found new FSCTL ops for it in the Win8 header files? Maybe they dropped it? Curious.
A few weeks ago, I pulled "Hail Mary" with regards to saving an SBS 2003 server. For whatever reason, the server would not boot after a power failure. The RAID cache was not dirty on the card, and the RAID volume passed a manual parity consistency check. Unfortunately, the server would still not boot into the OS. It kept throwing a BSOD or hung at finding the hal.dll file. Attempting to access the recovery console or other F8 invoked options failed. Any Server 2003 disk would throw a BSOD the moment it attempted to mount the boot "C" volume. It wasn't the RAID drivers, but actual NTFS corruption causing the kernel panic. Serious shit. However, a Server 2008 R2 disk did save my ass. I was able to mount the volume through a command recovery console. A chkdsk revealed massive amounts of corruption. Server is fucked right? NO! A "chkdsk /R" command was able to find and repair all errors. No data loss what-so-ever.
Basically, the server must have been busy with installing updates or something when the power died. An old UPS battery will do that. But this goes to show how remarkably resilient the NTFS system is. Absolute respect!
Life is not for the lazy.
The summary links to a blog commenting on the new public release. The most relevant blog is present on the MSDN here.
While Mary-Jo Foley's blog has a link to it, this saves the hassle of hopping a bit to get to the nitty gritty.
When it comes down to it, NTFS is a pretty good file system. If you look in to things you find that the feature list for BTRFS reads an awful like a feature set of current NTFS.
None of that is to say that NTFS couldn't stand improvement, and indeed it is being improved, but I've yet to see the amazing widely used file system that is so much better than it. Ext3 is functional, but leaves much to be desired.
With patented algorithms to ensure that other OSes won't inter-operate without paying the Microsoft Patent Trolls a fee high enough to buy a Windows license for each machine in question.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
... to no one. Apart from maybe malware writers who'll be able to put an entire virus in the filename. Whether they'll be able to hide it or even use it is another matter but I wouldn't put it past Windows to have a nice exploit available.
Name the file system that offers features similar to NTFS, and is free for use that you recommend. Then please show me the Windows IFS driver for it
People like to hate on NTFS because they hate MS. However I haven't seen any replacements floating around.
Thus far the only thing I've seen in terms of any sort of open cross compatibility is a Ext2 driver for Windows. Not really up to date with that and not the kind of thing I'd want to run Windows on.
So what with nobody providing a great cross platform file system, I don't see why there's a reason not to just use what MS provides. NTFS has worked real well, and if this new FS is an improvement, great.
WinFS was not even a filesystem, it was meant to be basically a database for metadata storage on top of NTFS.
Too bad they dropped it, it's an interesting idea.
I think only BeOS had something like that, with support for metadata and queries built right into BeFS.
I'm wondering how many Sun / Oracle ZFS patents they are going to stomp on themselves. I doubt that Oracle will be any more willing to share certain patents with Microsoft, then Microsoft would share with Oracle.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
will filesystem specs again be handled as a "trade secret"? If so it is another basically unusable filesystem that I am forced to use on at least one critical machine. At least there is native NFS client support in Windows now. It really helps preventing the worst as the built-in backup option still sucks.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
How about a change that has been a long time coming, the elimination of drive letters. It has been a long time since we needed to mark a drive as C: to figure out where too boot the system.
There's a blog post linked from the article.
There's all kinds of promising stuff, like data corruption resilience and dropped/extended limits.
Much more interesting read than the linked ZDNet article.
Indeed very interesting - their approach seems sound and modern. First, they remove the non-essential features from the filesystem to keep it lean. They could be possibly reimplemented on top of the filesystem. And second, they mention using B+trees and allocate-on-write principle, which some modern filesystems use - Reiser4 springs to mind.
Interesting project to follow (and imitate in open source).
It needs some way to securely mount a remote filesystem. SMB and non-anonymous FTP shouldn't be used over the internet ever. It wouldn't be too bad except that FTP is incredibly difficult to reliably tunnel due to it opening connections in both directions on random ports. I would be a happy person if Windows added native support for sftp.
BeOS had a working implementation of what WinFS was supposed to be ... and it was implemented before MS and came across all the problems that WinFS had ...
MS found that a pure DB filesystem is a brilliant idea, but in practice it is not very fast unless you are very careful, and it seems they weren't ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Cannot make a directory for the word CON, PRT, etc - left over from DOS days.
That's an issue with the OS code atop the Installable File System layer (think "VFS layer"), not with the underlying file systems that plug into that layer, so ReFS can't and won't fix that.
This crazy post is modded +5 Informative, but there's zero evidence proving that any of the accounts are part of a "Waggener Edstrom rapid response team employed by MS." You people have gotten trolled so hard. Half the accounts he listed don't even post pro-Microsoft stuff, according to their post histories.
Is this really how easy it is to turn the community against people? Just list their names followed by a link to some company's website?
Meanwhile, NTFS is a solid file system, offering support for Unicode, alternate data streams, compression and ACLs long before any of those got acceptance in the Unix ecosystem. While my sympathies lie more with the GNU folks, I've got to give it to Microsoft for NTFS.
Uh, but aren't Microsoft now removing most of those things because most people don't use them?
Or is compression and quotas something that you'd want, or at least want to be able to do if you chose on a filesystem level for a server? I know when I was admin of a large SAN half of my work was figuring out who needed how much data and making sure they got it by putting a quota on the hosting array. How exactly you go about this without it at the filesystem level? Are you supposed to provision a LUN for each user that is the size you want? What exactly was the reason for depreciating this? Is there a measurable performance win?
The Ars Technica article has a bit more detail on ReFS than the story's original linked article.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/01/microsoft-introduces-new-robust-resilient-file-system-for-windows-server-8.ars
I was hoping for a comparison between the ReFS specs and other file systems, such as ext4, but I can't find anything informative enough despite the mods.
Will this for sure break linux os read-write compatibility for good? Or, just until a new module is available to read/write ReFS?
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wasn't something similar touted for Windows 7? (Or was it Vista?) And Win2K, now I think of it.
You can add your own signing keys to SecureBoot on X86 devices (as far as I know). It's just ARM and the low powered series that won't have it.
The problem isn't CREATING links with mklink.
It's OPENING them from application code in the future.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Wasn't there a port of FUSE to Win32?
The tin foil hat stays on better if you use screws.
You can e.g. mount an ext3 filesystem using the ext2 driver, and ext4 FS using the ext3 module or an ext2 filesystem (as-is, without converting it) using the ext4 module. In fact on current kernels the ext4 module is the preferred way to mount any ext* partition: you get a speed boost even without on-disk changes.
And, BTW, NTFS is not a filesystem, it's a commercial brand for a family of filesystems with frequent small incompatible changes. Try reading a disk formatted on a recent Windows on an older version...
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Back when Windows NT first came out (and later the Pentium Pro) neither Microsoft nor Intel had much credibility in the workstation/server space. These were pretty big transitions, much like Boeing designing a new airframe, and by the standards of big enterprise normally applied to these things, both projects hit it out of the park.
Microsoft's mindset at the time was embrace and extend. Let me translate that for you. If someone someday designs a sex android the way Microsoft designed software in the 1990s, it will come equiped with six vaginas. When you get it home, you'll soon discover it came equipped with six shallow / crusty vaginas. Check list compatible, for the PHB. Every vagina under the sun. That was the whole point of Windows NT. When organizations procured software, the first question was "does it have enough vaginas?" Sold, to the man with the bulging eyebrows!
Twelve years later, the auction has moved on. Time to remove all those extra vaginas. A lot has changed since then in seek to fetch ratios. All things considered, NTFS had a pretty good run.
Are they actually going to release this one? I remember one of the big features of Vista was to be their new filesystem Win FS. Although, I guess Microsoft had enough criticisms to deal with in Vista that it could have been even more of a disaster to release a new filesystem with it.
WinFS was ditched before Vista development was started. Yes, it was part of the original Longhorn project; but that project after 3 years was tossed, and a new Longhorn project was started that became Vista, and then reved and became Win7; but if I recall correctly, WinFS didn't make it into the second round of Longhorn (e.g. what was to become Vista).
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
While I don't buy the idea that you and bonch are are connected to the MS shill accounts since you seem to be Apple fanbois, there is no question you and bonch seem to be the same person posting the same shit in the same stories.
Even idiots like commodore_64_love would come clean about having multi accounts, but you refuse to. Fuck off.
Singed,
NOT GreatBunzinni
You're supposed to use WebDAV for that. It's not as nice and easy as sftp, but it does work.
I am trolling
1) I'd seriously debate those are better. Ext4 I'll flat out say is not better. That's the reason BTRFS is being worked on and if you read BTRFS's feature set it reads like NTFS's current features. ReiserFS seems to have good features but is flakey, it can have data corruption. That's not acceptable. A FS has to work all the time. ZFS, well see my other post, but maybe that one.
2) Nobody has made Windows drivers for them. Do that, then we can talk. Maybe then Windows people start using another FS, and if that happens, maybe MS looks at official support. However given that the FSes you talk about provide no support for Windows, why should Windows provide support for them?
They removed all the hard to implement features that require tradeoffs, and dumbed down the system to the point where a decent subset of their power users will continue to use NTFS...
All the while missing the single most important thing to happen in storage in the last 50 years... Aka SSDs and the ability to seek quickly.
That is a pretty awesome name. I'm going to name one of my MMO character's that, seriously.
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.
Except that the original blog post where this was discussed states that ReFS will be extensible just like NTFS in the context of supporting features they will not be supporting out of the box.
My goodness, your tinfoil hat must be *on fire*!
It's turtles all the way down!
Proctogon? PROCTOGON? You are seriously naming this after an all-seeing (panopticon) anal doctor (proctologist)???
It's true. Microsoft couldn't market an iceberg in the sahara. Or maybe it's truth-in-advertising--this file system is going to crawl so far your computer's ass it'll know what you had for lunch.
Remain calm! All is well!
Yep, that was a nasty freudian slut.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
You are confused. The only time I've bothered pointing out that the bonch account and Overly Critical Guy accounts are sockpuppet accounts was in this comment, after I read this comment blowing your cover. And since then I've also stumbled on this comment, which provides further evidence. Are you also going to claim that I am chrb?
And rest assure. I have some time to spare about now which I will waste replying to bonch/overly critical guy posts with messages pointing out that they are sockpuppet accounts. You can thank your personal attacks for this one.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I'm still waiting for WinFS two operating systems ago.
Meanwhile I've also stumbled on this post, which raises the suspicion that the bonch and SharkLazer accounts are also controlled by the same people. This post also points out that suspicion. Could it be that you also made the same mistake with messages posted from the SharkLazer account as the ones made from the Overly Critical Guy one?
These sockpuppet accounts follow the same posting pattern: one account starts a discussion, either karma-whoring or astroturfing, and the other accounts then quickly intervene to either support the previous message or publicly attack any poster which contradicts the official POV adopted by this shill organization. Here are a couple of examples:
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Has WHOOSH been deprecated?
--
I hope this comment creates a much-needed gap in the discussion.