The (unconfirmed) info says that Mac OS X 10.4 will go “further than anticipated”, introducing not only a “database-driven” new Finder (possibly similar to BeOS’ Tracker) –although the file system itself will still be HFS+– but also a wide support for file metadata. Please note that both the BeFS (and quite possibly this Apple implementation) is not similar to Longhorn’s WinFS (apples & oranges). All this is not a surprise for us, as the people who were behind the same realization on BeOS –Dominic Giampaolo and Pavel Cisler– today work at key positions at Apple Computer in the file system and Finder areas respectively. Pavel is also known for the Gnome Nautilus work while Dominic’s legendary book “Practical File System Design with the Be File System” was recently released for free as a PDF. Enjoy!
Next Mac OS X to be Metadata-driven?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
How is Apple using a database filesystem and metadata not like MS using a database file system and metadata?
Not that I condone the abuse of patents and such, but I believe that Be Inc. has more of a claim on such technologies than SCO does on any Linux code.
Be will 0wn3z M$ and teh mAC!!!11~~~1!
Because MS won’t be using a “database filesystem” but a database which works in conjunction with the filesystem. It will be a version of MS SQL which stores metadata.
> How is Apple using a database filesystem and metadata not like MS using a database file system and metadata?
WinFS is a glorified FS index, this is supposed to be like the BeFS.
While I haven’t seen this OS with my own eyes, if it is metadata-driven as the post Fryke.com claims, then it is NOT database-driven. People think that WinFS’s way and BeFS’ way is the same, while this is not true at all.
People very often say that BeFS was database-driven while this is also false. The pure db-driven file system Be had in 1997 (created by Benoit Schilings I think) was completely scrapped by the coming of Dominic at Be who re-wrote the fs from scratch and made it metadata-driven instead. From what I know from that era, the db-driven FS Be had wasn’t scaling up so they redesigned it.
Based on that description at Fryke, Apple is going for a Be-like implementation, not a old-Befs/WinFS-like one (an impression strongly empowered by the fact Pavel and Dominic work for it). The guy who leaked the information just make the same mistake as most people using BeOS that are not programmers do: they think it is db-driven, while it’s not.
Please note that both the BeFS (and quite possibly this Apple implementation) is not similar to Longhorn’s WinFS (apples & oranges)
Are there other differences between BeFS and WinFS besides the implementation? (as in, are there things you can do with BeFS and not with WinFS and vice versa?). And then there is ReiserFS, and this new rumored HFS+.. I can only assume that all those new filesystems are going to be more flexible than BeFS thanks to hindsight, on the other hand, BeFS didn’t had to worry about backwards compatibility.
Man, an article about all these filesystems, and how they stack up against eachother would be great 🙂 One thing is for sure, tomorrow, I will go to the ReiserFS presentation at fosdem 🙂
The whole WinFS item/relationship schema thing is a big difference between BFS and WinFS. BFS just let you slap random attributes on any file you want IIRC and then efficiently search on them and create live query folders based on them.
With WinFS you can define complex data types (items) and also define relationships between items. Think of it more as an object database.
I suppose you could build such a system on top of BFS or ReiserFS, using the extended file attributes as storage. Note how WinFS doesn’t store it’s metadata as extended file attributes, but in a database. Any legacy files stored in WinFS are a monitored and their internal metadata is extracted and synchronized with the DB by WinFS.
It’ll be interesting to see what Apple comes up with, if anything.
Obviously Apple, is taking interest in the WinFS technologies that will Debut in Windows Longhorn. So, they are going to prove that they can build a better, faster, more efficient secure Indexing File System than Microsoft.
Microsoft is also taking a page out of Apples book, by adopting the richness of the Interface. So, its obvious that Apple and Microsoft has become copy cats of each other.
From what that site said, it doesn’t sound like they are changing much from the end user point of view, just under the hood stuff. MacOS’s have been indexed from a long time now, this just changes the way they are indexing it and adds metadata support. 10.3 already has real-time searching.
well, they might make it possable to store qureies as file folders…it would be great for a media PC.
Anyone have a mirror of that PDF file for file system design? It is taking forever to download it!
Damn this is going to be sweet!
HFS+ is the same file system Apple’s been using since MacOS 8.1 – which was released in 1998 (or 1997 – I forget just now).
yeah right just like the itanium did. its nice to see apple’s hard work on OS X.
The frequent improvements might irritate some, namely the people who spent $100 on the last one and don’t want to do so again, but its really demonstrating leadership. It is making that OS better and better.
The quality of the OS and apple’s constant improvements to it are becomming a real positive from a prospective buyers perspective. I think apple is going to continue to win converts based on the quality of OS X alone.
I put it on my Webspace at
http://www.funtech.org/downloads/Temp/practical-file-system-design.pdf
It’ll only be a view days there.
@Eugenia
>From what I know from that era, the db-driven FS Be had wasn’t
>scaling up so they redesigned it.
It was worse than that. The old FS had a really badly incompatible model, which pretty much stopped any foreign filesystems from bein able to be mounted as filesystems propper.
One of the big things Domonic et al did was to use a VNODE system and an abstraction layer to make other fiflesystems fit into the realms of implementation. Until the rewrite, this was eithe impossible, or extremely hard to do. Put it this way, up to DR9/AA/PR, when the new FS came in, IIRC you could not have multiple partitions on a OFS formatted disk. Not even CD rom.
The OFS used to use Record nodes with a bunch of API on top of them to store the fields of the record, and there was a seperate DB server running in userland (iirc) which co-ordinated the links between the raw files and the database “metadata”. The problem was that the DB index quite often went out of synch and hosed the FS. Reliablility was fairly poor with the OFS.
I have one available also at students.cs.byu.edu/~clementi/practical-file-system-design.pdf
>[…BFS vs WinFS…] Be started it at 1996-7. Happy now?
No, if you count the OFS then Be started it in around ’92 or ’93. Certainly by ’95 (DR6) the OFS was well established. AFAIK the hobbit boxes used the OFS, so ’93 is quite a good estimate for an established OFS too.
The only major thing to change between DR6 (and prior) and DR7 was the way resource forks were handled. They dropped the pseudo Mac implementation and did it a bit more elegantly IIRC.
>>I put it on my Webspace at
>>www.funtech.org/downloads/Temp/practical-file-system-design.pd f
>>It’ll only be a view days there.
smashIt,
Thanks for the link. Much better speed than the original site.
Lots of good reading for the weekend!
Cyberbear
@cyberbear: no prob, as long as you don’t crack my 3GB trafic-limit
would be interresting how many people here are actualy working on their own FS…
http:/beos.spb.ru/program/105/practical-file-system-design.pdf.zip
Pratical Filesystem Design is a great book. Complete, well-written, and to-the-point. I really like authors who manage to just say what they have to say, instead of writing 1000+ page books where only 200 pages consists of actual content.
http://users.aber.ac.uk/mmb9/data/practical-file-system-design.pdf
Its a good book I’ve the dead tree version, if you can find a copy get hold of it its a handy thing to have on the shelf.
i’m a little late for this topic, but, if apple can implement Finder to index folders (and Desktop) as fast as Tracker, i would cream my pants.
it seems like OS X is slowly becoming what BeOS was so many years ago… now if the dock could be reduced to the size of the DeskBar i might be in OS heaven.
…for a LONG time. I hope Apple does it. I hope the former BeOS guys at Apple make this happen. I hope they make it everything the BeFS was and then some. Build live queries into the Finder as “Smart Folders” (like the Smart Albums and Smart Playlists of iPhoto and iTunes) and I’ll be in 7th heaven.
BTW, janerio, you can put the Dock on the left, bottom, or right of the screen and size it small or as big as you like. It’s your choice. You can even tweak the Dock’s settings file a bit to “pin” the dock to one corner or another instead of being centered. It’s a pretty flexible UI element.
Jared
it seems like OS X is slowly becoming what BeOS was so many years ago… now if the dock could be reduced to the size of the DeskBar i might be in OS heaven.
Not a real surprise (and on the other hand a just little bit), since Be was founded by ex-apple employees if I am correct.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding concerning HFS+: It has always supported a db like structure (even more so than BFS) and extensible Attributes. It’s just that the Finder has never supported those.
Obviously, there are improvements you can make to the design, but the basic architecture for such features has been there since 8.1. Indeed, the “piles” patent Apple has is pretty old.
Thanks smashIt (IP: —.dipool.highway.telekom.at)! Your line is quite fast I’d say! Thanks again!
thanks for that post, I was looking to buy that if I could only find it, goes far beyong the BeOS world but like all the BeOS books was getting hard to find.
Mac OS X 10.4 sounds like heaven!
How is it that Apple is copying something that is not going to be out for 2 years? How can they copy something that they are going to get to market before MS does?
“How can they copy something that they are going to get to market before MS does?”
WinFS exists now, if not in a ready to purchase form. That’s how. Everybody copies everybody else all the time. deal with it.
I think there is a lot of confusion. WinFS is nothing new, it is just MSFT using their proprietary SQL Server technology as a layer on top of NTFS. WINFS is not the actual file system, it is a way to do a two way link between SQL Server relations and NTFS. There is probably some glue code between the layers to dynamically keep them synched, through maybe a OS X style Alias. When Bill Gates originally announced WinFS, he wrongly described it as a new file system, later on he corrected himself and mentioned that the underlying file system was still NTFS, and WinFS was designed to be layered on top of it. WinFS is an attempt to resolve the long standing meta data deficiency and poor indexing in Windows.
On the other hand, Mac OS from version 1.0 had a very rich metadata built into each file and IIRC it has very good btree+ indexing till today. In fact, it appears apple re-factored the indexing for Panther to allow for the real cool quick search feature. So whereas OS X’s file system is evolving forward, Windows seems to be making a leap to catch up. But, the WinFS constraint is performance. Do you know what it requires to run SQL Server as a background task? Lots of RAM and a very well threaded OS and Apps. So Longhorn’s requirements are going to jump as well. That is why many feel that Longhorn will require at the minimum a 4GHz Pentium and 1GB of RAM. Compare that to Panther running pretty well on a 300MHz G4 with 256MB of RAM, though I recommend at least 384MB for both Panther and XP.
So don’t be taken by the WinFS hype, there is a long way for Microsoft to go before bringing WinFS to reality and by then OS X will be another two to three revisions further along. IIRC adding dynamic Folders (Smart Folders) should be in Apple’s next release. But, you can kind of do that now with the search tool and some simple Applescripting.
I don’t think Apple is trying to compete with WinFS (although that could be a nice side effect). They are just trying to resolve the big issues that MacOS X has with file metadata.