The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective
Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2010 9:55 am
Article
A 64-bit address space
Use of journaling
Highly multithreaded reading
Support of database-like extended file attributes
Optimization for streaming file access
BeOS was probably my favorite OS of all time (yes, even more so than FreeBSD). I was VERY sad to see what happened with the company, but I'm also very happy to see how far Haiku has come lately. The file system in BeOS was and is ahead of it's time (like the whole OS!)Improvements of Haiku BFS over BeOS
Haiku’s version of BFS has a number of improvements over the original BeOS BFS implementation. The B+tree is more robust. Haiku BFS uses a file cache for file data in addition to a block cache. This resulted in a factor of 10 speed improvement. Haiku’s BFS implements status changed time for files, and also has more fine-grained file status capability. The POSIX atime file was omitted from BeOS BFS for performance's sake. Haiku BFS includes a query optimized for hybrid regex that allows mixing of a static string with a regular expression. New inspection tools bfsinfo, bfswhich, chkindex, and recover were added for Haiku BFS. The reindex command was added to improve indexing of extended attributes.