*BSD News Article 63957


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From: mandtbac@news.abo.fi (Mats Andtbacka)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Ideal filesystem
Followup-To: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Date: 21 Mar 1996 14:57:53 GMT
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Adam Megacz, in <314E0DB7.624ACB10@netcom.com>:
>Mats Andtbacka wrote:

[...]
>Until Minix/Linux came along, the UNIX way was to charge a lot of money
>for a system and not release source code. I refuse to let "the Unix way"
>interfere with the future of operating systems. If you have any logical
>reasons (aside from the "gut feeling" mentioned above), I'd be glad to
>hear them.

conceptual cleanliness. when you hear about old traditions, wanting to
overthrow them is well and good, but stopping to wonder how they came
to be old traditions can be good too; the simple byte stream, while
perhaps unpractical for some things, has a few things going for it -
ease of implementation being just one.

>> >They reside in the inode,
>> not if you want a fixed-size inode they don't. (i'm under the
>> impression that at least ext2, and probably FFS, use fixed-size
>> one-block inodes; do correct me if i'm mistaken.)

>HPFS has fixed inode sizes, stores EA's in the inode, and it is the best
>implementation of EA's to date.

then HPFS surely must have limits on EA size and number? and probably
decently low limits, to avoid wasting ridiculous amounts of disk space
on inodes alone? (i've long wanted to find a good technical paper on
the structure of HPFS; does anybody happen to know of one?)
-- 
   "I'm more differed from than differing"   --  Arthur Dent