A.P. Lawrence

File Systems

Tue Dec 16 13:15:34 GMT 2003 File Systems

A long time ago, I made a newsgroup post in which I suggested that file systems were an unnecessary part of an OS - that the disk should just be for swap. I felt that the whole OS design would be much cleaner, that programming would be easier, etc.

I got my head handed to me on a platter. I don't recall if I even bothered to defend myself from the chorus of derogatory remarks that mostly concerned themselves with my obvious lack of intelligence and ignorance of OS principles.

Oh well. The barrage didn't change my opinion any, but I shelved it as an idea too radical, or perhaps just too early.

This morning I was reminded of this by something in Eric Raymond's new book "The Art of Unix Programming" - this section: File Systems Might Be Considered Harmful. Huh? Turns out that at least some people were thinking about this long before I was: http://www.eros-os.org/. I haven't had the time yet to look very deeply at this, but they do have a lot of interesting concepts.

Comments /Blog/B724.html
CommentsBlog724 :
"A long time ago, I made a newsgroup post in which I suggested that file systems were an unnecessary part of an OS - that the disk should just be for swap. I felt that the whole OS design would be much cleaner, that programming would be easier, etc."

Dig up a Wang 2200: no filesystem. User written apps often were forced to do raw I/O to disk blocks and somehow keep it all organized. The 2200 did come with a very strange version of BASIC called BASIC-2, which lives on in Kerridge Computer's incredibly awful KCML interpreter for UNIX.

--BigDumbDinosaur

I owned a Wang back in the late 1970's. I kind of liked the Basic :-)

But that's not what I mean by no filesystem. The idea is that a filesystem is not necessary for the user or programmer to deal with - you deal with objects in virtual memory, that are moved to and from disk without you knowing or caring.

--TonyLawrence


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