*BSD News Article 64105


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From: Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Ideal filesystem
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Date: Sat, 23 Mar 1996 22:03:18 GMT
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> 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.
Yes, but new features are always hard to implement :-)

> >> >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?)

1) The limit is 64k, which is very generous. EA's can spill over into
extra Inodes, but conceptually, they are still part of the origional
Inode. Rumor has it that HPFSII (codename Merlin) will eliminate the 64k
limit.

2) Check Microsoft (sadly, it was they who invented HPFS). They have a
great paper that discusses the power of HPFS, but doesn't give enough
information to implement an FS driver.


-- 
Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com>
Website ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/ka/kalessin/adam.html
Linux - OS/2