It’s a bit of a slow news week in technology this week due the US celebrating Independence Day this past 4 July, so Ars decided to repost this article about BFS, and I’m nothing if not a sucker for BeOS content, so here it goes.
The Be operating system file system, known simply as BFS, is the file system for the Haiku, BeOS, and SkyOS operating systems. When it was created in the late ’90s as part of the ill-fated BeOS project, BFS’s ahead-of-its-time feature set immediately struck the fancy OS geeks. That feature set includes:
- A 64-bit address space
- Use of journaling
- Highly multithreaded reading
- Support of database-like extended file attributes
- Optimization for streaming file access
A dozen years later, the legendary BFS still merits exploration – so we’re diving in today, starting with some filesystem basics and moving on to a discussion of the above features. We also chatted with two people intimately familiar with the OS: the person who developed BFS for Be and the developer behind the open-source version of BFS.
A good read.
Was it fixed? I thought it was limited to a 2^48 bit address space.
Is that a limitation of BeFS, or 64-bit implementations of BeFS (because current x86-64 chips have a 48-bit address space)?
if it only would have checksumming, copies=2 (also for metadata) and maybe basic file versioning, then it would be kinda perfect for the desktop! (i could live without snapshots for my desktop pc)
How did BeOS 5 Personal Edition (all I had; one magazine included it on its CD) BFS work in a file inside Windows filesystem?
And don’t BFS features make it slow?…