sad

[jsusanka]

microsoft's fat patent

http://news.com.com/Microsofts+file+sys ... g=nefd.top


I still don't see how after all these years of not enforcing their so-called inventions that all of the sudden they get a patent and now they can have the bucks roll in.

Isn't there some kind of precedence here where they let everyone use it like crazy without any enforcement (like 20+years without enforcement) and it becomes the defacto standard but now we are going to charge for it because we got lawyers on staff with nothing to do so we are going to just file patents like crazy and eventually we will get lucky.

that's just insane and criminal to me but I am not a lawyer.

[snarkout]

I imagine history is going to view these past 5 years with shock and horror, but perhaps not. Perhaps history won't even bat an eye, sort of like the millions of sheeple who are happily giving up their rights daily, unquestioningly.

[Tsuroerusu]

Well, someone just needs to write a rock solid EXT2 driver for Windows if Micro$uck starts charging license fees, and then all the guys making thumb drives could use EXT2, which happens to be better than FAT

[CptnObvious999]

FAT is used very widely. It is a standard for portable devices so lets just hope MS doesn't send out its army of lawyers.

[Tsuroerusu]

FAT is used very widely. It is a standard for portable devices so lets just hope MS doesn't send out its army of lawyers.

Well, I do think they will, Bill can't ever have a good enough toilet right?

[Patrick]

Sad but not surprising. Time for the HW manufacturers to go to a bettor format such as ext2/3.

[Tsuroerusu]

Sad but not surprising. Time for the HW manufacturers to go to a bettor format such as ext2/3.

Yeah, and the EXT2/3 file systems are heavily documented, and the sourcecode is available so even if they wanted to create their own proprieptary implementation it probably wouldn't be that difficult.

[CptnObvious999]

just wondering what exactly is better or worse about ext2 and ext3? I know ext3 is a journaling filesystem however I don't know exactly what that means

[Tsuroerusu]

just wondering what exactly is better or worse about ext2 and ext3? I know ext3 is a journaling filesystem however I don't know exactly what that means

From Wikipedia:

A journaling file system is a file system that logs changes to a journal (usually a circular log in a specially-allocated area) before actually writing them to the main file system.

File systems tend to be very large data structures; updating them to reflect changes to files and directories usually requires many separate write operations. This introduces a race condition, in which an interruption (like a power failure or system crash) can leave data structures in an invalid intermediate state.

For example, deleting a file on a Unix file system involves two steps:

1. removing its directory entry
2. marking the file's inode as free space in the free space map

If step 1 occurs just before a crash, there will be an orphaned inode and hence a storage leak. On the other hand, if step 2 is performed first before the crash, the not-yet-deleted inode will be marked free and possibly be overwritten by something else.

One way to recover is to do a complete walk of the file system's data structures when it is next mounted to detect and correct any inconsistencies. This can be very slow for large file systems, and is likely to become slower yet, given that the ratio of storage capacity to I/O bandwidth on modern mass storage devices is rising.

Another way to recover is for the file system to keep a journal of the changes it intends to make, ahead of time. Recovery then simply involves re-reading the journal and replaying the changes logged in it until the file system is consistent again. In this sense, the changes are said to be atomic (or indivisible) in that they will have either:

* Have succeeded originally.
* Be replayed completely during recovery.
* Not be replayed at all.

Log-structured file systems are those which the journal is itself the entire filesystem. As of 2005, none of the most popular general-purpose filesystems are log-structured, although WAFL and Reiser4 borrow some techniques from log-structured file systems.

Databases use more rigorous versions of the same journaling techniques to ensure data integrity.

Journaling can have a severe impact on performance because it requires that all data be written twice. Metadata-only journaling is a compromise between reliability and performance that stores only changes to file metadata (which is usually relatively small and hence less of a drain on performance) in the journal. This still ensures that the file system can recover quickly when next mounted, but leaves an opportunity for data corruption because unjournaled file data and journaled metadata can fall out of sync with each other.

For example, appending to a file on a Unix file system typically involves three steps:

1. Increasing the size of the file in its inode.
2. Allocating space for the extension in the free space map.
3. Actually writing the appended data to the newly-allocated space.

In a metadata-only journal, it would not be clear after a crash whether step 3 was done or not, because it would not be logged. If step 3 was not done but steps 1 and 2 are replayed anyway after a crash, the file will gain a tail of garbage.

The write cache in most operating systems will traditionally order its writes with an elevator sort (or some similar scheme) to maximize throughput. To an out-of-order write hazard, writes for file data must be ordered in the sort so that they are committed to storage before their associated metadata. This can be tricky to implement because it requires coordination within the operating system kernel between the file system driver and write cache.

Soft updates (i.e. used in most free BSD-Dialects as FreeBSD or OpenBSD) take a variation of this approach by dispensing with a journal but imposing an order on all writes to ensure that the file system never becomes inconsistent to begin with, or that the only inconsistency that ever happens is a storage leak. Recovery then simply becomes a matter of running a background walk of the file system to garbage collect any data orphaned in leaks.