Be File System
| Company type | File system |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer file systems |
| Predecessor | Old Be File System (OFS) |
| Founded | September 1996 |
| Founder | Dominic Giampaolo, Cyril Meurillon |
| Products | 64-bit journaling file system |
The Be File System (BFS) serves as the primary file system for the BeOS operating system. To prevent confusion with the Boot File System in Linux environments, it is referred to as "BeFS" on that platform.
Created by Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon within a ten-month period starting in September 1996, BFS introduced a contemporary 64-bit journaling file system to BeOS. It features case sensitivity and can be utilized on various storage media including hard drives, floppy disks, and read-only formats such as CD-ROMs. However, its relatively large header size—ranging from 600 KB up to 2 MB—makes it less suitable for smaller removable devices.
BFS evolved from its predecessor, the Old Be File System (OFS), originally designed by Benoit Schillings. It incorporates extended file attributes (metadata) alongside indexing and querying capabilities that resemble those of a relational database.
Although engineered to support 64-bit addressing, certain on-disk structures impose a practical limit on volume sizes near 2 exabytes. The extent-based allocation method restricts individual file sizes to approximately 260 gigabytes, with fragmentation potentially reducing this maximum.
Comprehensive explanations of BFS’s architecture, API, and design principles are provided in the publication Practical File System Design with the Be File System.
Implementations
Following the initial BFS release for BeOS in 1996, multiple Linux-based implementations appeared. In 1999, Makoto Kato created a Linux driver for BFS; however, it suffered from stability issues. A more reliable Linux BFS driver was introduced by Will Dyson in 2001.
In 2002, Axel Dörfler and collaborators developed OpenBFS as a reimplementation of BFS for Haiku (formerly OpenBeOS). Robert Szeleney forked OpenBFS in 2004 to adapt it for his SkyOS operating system. Additionally, the standard OpenBFS has been ported to Syllable OS and has been included since version 0.6.5.
See also
External links
- The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective, by Andrew Hudson, published June 3, 2010, Ars Technica