On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Andrew Pattison wrote:
I would personally find an NTFS filesystem driver for Solaris much more
useful than one for FAT / FAT32. I believe NTFS support should be a
higher priority that supporting FAT / FAT32. The only place I can think
of where FAT is used in modern computer systems is on removable storage
devices, e.g. memory sticks for digital cameras, whereas NTFS is used by
virtually every Windows-based system.
"Only" place ? FAT is:
- on all memory sticks / flash cards
- on all digital cameras (part of the spec for these)
- most digital media/music players
- most external USB/Firewire harddisks sold as Windows AND Mac
compatible (no NTFS for MacOS...)
- still the default filesystem for DVD-RAM even on Windows XP
- the least common denominator for what all systems can read/write
That's only a lot :-)
NTFS is truly important for multi-OS installations on the same machine,
ack, but it's still mostly a Microsoft-only thing, due to MS not having
opened the specs for it - an opensource NTFS driver is always a
reengineered project.
(Not saying an NTFS driver should be in the same project though).
I'd absolutely second the idea that having NTFS is important, and if we
had a really great FAT driver then we shouldn't waste time on making that
better but rather focus on NTFS. Problem is, we don't have a great FAT
driver yet ... and there are enough reasons to have one. Besides, FAT is
such a simple filesystem that documentation / design writeups / code
samples we give out for the PCFS project will be useful for filesystem
writers in OpenSolaris in general - due to simplicity.
I'd give seconds for an NTFS project, but NTFS doesn't have enough in
common with FAT that there could be much codesharing; it'd be a separate
filesystem driver, and would need to be a separate project.
Anyone willing to work on an NTFS project as well ? I cannot advise on
NTFS, now little about its internals, but I can give those that want to
work on it help on the Solaris filesystem interfaces, and/or porting
advice from the *BSDs.
Thanks to everyone who responded so far !
FrankH.
Cheers
Andrew.
This message posted from opensolaris.org
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]>
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
