BE FILE SYSTEM

The 'Be File System' ('BFS', occasionally misnamed as BeFS) is the native file system for the BeOS operating system.
BFS was developed by Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon over a ten month period, starting in September 1996^[2], to provide BeOS with a modern 64-bit capable journaling file system^[3]. It is case sensitive and capable of being used on floppy, hard disks and read-only media such as CD-ROMs, although its use on small removable media is not advised, as the file system headers consume from 600KB to 2MB, rendering floppy disks virtually useless.
Like its predecessor, OFS (written by Benoit Schillings, Old Be File System, was also called BFS when current^[4]), it includes support for extended file attributes (metadata) with indexing and querying characteristics to provide functionality similar to that of a relational database.
Whilst intended as a 64-bit capable file system the size of some on-disk structures mean that practical size limit is approximately 2 exabytes. Similarly the extent based file allocation reduces the maximum practical file size to approximately 260 gigabytes at best and as little as a few blocks in a pathological worst case depending on the degree of fragmentation.
Its design process, application programming interface, and internal workings are, for the most part, documented in the book ''Practical File System Design with the Be File System''.

Contents

Implementations

References

See also

Implementations

In early 1999, Makoto Kato developed a Be File System driver for Linux, however the driver never reached a complete stable state, so in 2001 Will Dyson developed his own version of the Linux BFS driver^[5].
As part of the OpenBeOS attempt to recreate the BeOS operating system, in 2002 Axel Dörfler and a few other developers created and released a reimplemented BFS called OpenBFS^[6]. In January 2004, Robert Szeleney announced that he had developed a fork of this OpenBFS file system for use in his SkyOS operating system^[7].

References

1. BeOS Journal 10: A First Look at DR9 Scot Hacker
2. Practical File System Design with the Be File System, , Dominic, Giampaolo, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999, ISBN 1-55860-497-9
3. Windows on a database – sliced and diced by BeOS vets Andrew Orlowski
4. Benoît Schillings, Software Engineer Henry Bortman
5. BeFS driver for Linux: About BeFS Will Dyson
6. OBFS Reaches Beta Daniel Teixeira
7. Update Robert Szeleney

See also

★ Comparison of file systems