Hello!
On Fri 04-09-26 09:51:10, Tigran Aivazian wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Sept 2026 at 09:30, Ethan Nelson-Moore <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> > BFS (not to be confused with BeFS, the BeOS filesystem) is the
> > filesystem UnixWare uses for its boot partition. It has extremely
> > limited functionality, only supporting contiguous files and no
> > subdirectories. Even though the bfs driver is very small and is
> > unlikely to cause future maintenance problems, given that the only type
> > of data stored on such a partition is likely to be kernels and
> > bootloader settings, there is very little reason anyone would want to
> > access it from Linux. Other old Unix filesystems (efs, freevxfs) have
> > been removed recently, and bfs is highly unlikely to have any users, so
> > remove it as well. Retain the UAPI header to be safe.
>
> You are right that probably no one would want to use BFS for storing the
> actual data today. But some things have didactical value, rather than
> mere pragmatic usage. It is the didactic value of MINIX (and its
> limitations wrt making use of the wonderful capabilities of i386) that
> has originally triggered the creation of Linux. But back to BFS: it is
> actually used in Steve Pate's book "Linux Filesystems" (2024, unfinished
> yet), which is a sequel to his excellent classic "UNIX Filesystems"
> (2003), as an illustration of a particularly simple filesystem
> implementation.
So I agree BFS is simple. In fact so simple that I was confused by how it
can get away with not implementing certain bits when having to modify it
couple months ago when doing some fs-wide fixes :). Regarding didactical
value, we currently also have minix and ext2 implementations more or less
for educational purposes so frankly, I don't think we need a third one.
Honza
--
Jan Kara <[email protected]>
SUSE Labs, CR
