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Right now this article is among others split into
But as it is right now it is inconsistently applied:
We should rename the sections and/or restructure the article so that the subsections actually make sense.
Kwinzman ( talk) 17:08, 30 October 2021 (UTC)
Solaris doesn't support Lustre and incorrectly has a Yes box. See Sun's own page or Wikipedia's page. Aolcarton ( talk) 17:59, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
The Limits section on NTFS states "Allowable characters in directory entries" are "Any Unicode except NUL, /". I believe this is incorrect. As stated in the Microsoft Naming a File page ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx), it clearly states
That almost any character is supported, except for the following:
< > : " / \ | ? *
We discovered this limitation while backing up files from an HFS+ file system to an NTFS 6.0 file system. The HFS+ system had a carriage return (decimal value 13) embedded in the file name.
-- Jamercee ( talk) 20:56, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
The wikipedia article on NTFS states that "Allowed characters in filenames" in "Posix namespace" is "any UTF-16 code unit (case sensitive) except U+0000 (NUL) and / (slash)" and we are here to compare Filesystem so we must not care of Win32 limitations.
-- 14:18, 29 September 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.67.232.57 ( talk)
I don't think I was clear in my original assertion. While copying files from an HFS+ filesystem to an NTFS filesystem we discovered that carriage return characters were NOT allowed while writting to the NTFS file system. Clearly Carriage-Return characters should have fallen within the range "Any Unicode except NUL, /". It would seem the limitation section should be expanded to encompass the true list of liminations, no?
Jamercee ( talk) 20:05, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Looks like youre confusing what your OS or software app allows with what NTFS allows
82.31.207.100 (
talk)
23:25, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
Another limits that seems to be wrong (in contrast to page on ntfs and info on ntfs.com): max. filename length is 255 UTF16 code-points, not 226. Is this a limit yhat evolved over time in different NTFS versions?
82.247.156.143 (
talk)
08:36, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
Also just mentioning in passing that Windows XP (presumably NT also) imposes a limit of 259 characters on the full path name but I'm not sure if that is a limitation imposed by NTFS or not. 150.101.105.182 ( talk) 04:24, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
Please provide reference for UFS2's support of block journaling. I cannot find one.
Moniker117 ( talk) 22:19, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
I've been looking around and here's some updates:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5093/fsoverview-43?l=en&a=view&q=ufs+logging
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/geom-gjournal.html
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#Journaling
http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-90950/ch02s05.html
I do not doubt that I am missing more operating systems. However, based on the above list, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and HP-UX appear to use UFS, but only FreeBSD has data level journaling support. I did not expect one file system to have such variation on one particular feature. It seems fair to me that it should read "No" for both "block journaling" and "meta-data only journaling" under both UFS and UFS2 while having a comment to indicate that certain operating systems implement different levels of journaling support. Any thoughts?
Moniker117 ( talk) 04:09, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Correction on FreeBSD, the GEOM implementation of journaling appears to be filesystem independent. Therefore, it is not a UFS or UFS2 feature.
Moniker117 ( talk) 14:36, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
NetBSD offers journaling on FFSv2 (UFS2) in recent kernels compiled with options WAPBL; mount FFSv2 volumes with the 'log' option to use this feature. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.83.37.40 ( talk) 03:19, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
Guys, journalling is a feature of filesystem _implementation_, while UFS has many of them. Solaris UFS has journalling. Other UFS implementations don't, except for FreeBSD and NetBSD ones, which seem to be done independently to each other. So, it is unclear whether we can say that UFS implements journalling.
However, UFS2 tends to refer to the current FreeBSD implementation of UFS, which definitely has journalling. Trasz ( talk) 12:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
Incidentally, the UFS logging in Solaris starts a long time before Solaris 7. In it's original incarnation, it required Disksuite and the logging was on to separate logging devices called trans meta logging. By Solaris 7, the log devices became invisible log files within the filesystem, and it was being bundled for free with the base OS, so it started being more widely known. 81.187.162.109 ( talk) 06:39, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
Online shrink/grow for HFS+ are currently listed as "unknown". The Boot Camp Assistant allows shrinking (when you create a Windows partition) and growing (when you delete one) of the running system's HFS+ partition. I don't know whether this is implemented in the FS driver or if it's a hack implemented somehow else... 24.60.192.190 ( talk) 23:12, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
The two tables for Metadata and Features, ReiserFS (which I assume is of the version 3) has none of the discussed properties ('No' for every single item). While I am no expert in file systems and ReiserFS in specific, this seems to be contradicting the page of ReiserFS, which states that one of the most publicised features of ReiserFS is "Metadata-only journalling". This suggests ReiserFS should have the minimal metadata for the purpose of system journalling. Besides, the table Features should otherwise have at least the Metadata journalling set to 'Yes' for ReiserFS. I have also checked earlier versions of this page (beginning of this year), and found that the tables were indicating many different properties for ReiserFS.
Obviously, vandalism has happened to this page recently. The maintainer of this page please restore the page to the proper state. It is much appreciated.
125.253.12.53 (
talk)
14:34, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
The page about Extended attribute does state that ReiserFS, at least in recent versions, does feature xattr / metadata support! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zuckerberg ( talk • contribs) 13:17, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount states that ACLs are supported in reiserfs. –
84.169.112.96 (
talk)
22:57, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
There is also the text “Full block journaling for ReiserFS was not added to Linux 2.6.8 for obvious reasons.” To me, the reasons are not obvious. That should be expanded upon, or some reference given. –
84.169.112.96 (
talk)
23:04, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
I was just reading about WinFS on it's own WikiPedia page, and was wondering how it compared to all these other file systems. It's not here. Oh well. I think it would be nice to have here. 71.174.4.229 ( talk) 20:41, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
The link given is broken, does anyone have a backup for the driver that allows NTFS to be used with Windows 95/98? I could really use it. Coolgamer ( talk) 03:43, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
There does not exist any NTFS 6.0 ! There are only system extentions of Windows NT 6.0 (Vista/2008) but inside the specifications of the current NTFS 3.1
I've added a new column to the features table to cover deduplication. I've filled in what I know of existing or being in development, but this leaves a lot of unknown entries. I suspect that all of the unknown's are really no but I don't have the knowledge to say for sure. Darrenmoffat ( talk) 11:38, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
I've Added/Updated Tables 1 and 2 for exFAT and TexFAT. But these 2 FS types should be added to tables:
Also Table 6 OS Support Needs Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 break out (maybe in the same column?) Frankk74 ( talk) 06:52, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
Sorting across the tables should be refined or made more consistent? Any thoughts?
Why there is "NO" for ReiserFS & Ext? for File Creation Time Stamps? I feel that this article is worthless since it contains obviously erroneous information. Might someone fix that or delete the article? -- 82.113.121.154 ( talk) 21:00, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
My understanding is that these do not give you file creation time stamps. Instead you get the last inode update timestamp. Initially this corresponds to the creation time, but later changes (such as to file metadata) may change that timestamp, without modifying the underlying file data. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.105.130.254 ( talk) 05:33, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
It would be interesting to have some comparison of market share or some other usage statistic, either here or on file system. -- Beland ( talk) 14:29, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
It might, indeed. However, as file systems are hardly ‘products’ in the original sense (more like an abstract design), then the concept of ‘market’ is difficult to apply. This would be like having ‘market share’ for natural languages, as such. How would such data be collected, anyway? You've then got statistical analysis problems; for example: how should someone using multiple file systems be counted? They're not mutually exclusive, via partitioning. — Lee Carré ( talk) 13:54, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
I feel that this table would be much more useful if it did not list any filesystems until they are supported by more than one OS. After all, while long list of special purpose linux filesystems is interesting, it seems like it perhaps defeats the purpose of this table? Why not focus on Cross-OS support, perhaps even labeling it such instead? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.162.99.237 ( talk) 19:15, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
Would it make sense to add more mobile OSs? Android? — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
50.157.95.208 (
talk)
09:43, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
According to http://www.freebsd.org/projects/bigdisk/index.html, UFS2 file and volume limit is 2^73, not a "Yobibyte". -- Eike sauer ( talk) 08:56, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
I just noticed this article uses lot of IEC prefixes such as EiB but WP:MOSNUM states the IEC prefixes are not to be used except in a few conditions that are not met by this article. I think changing the article to use familiar prefixes would be an improvement. 217.213.60.238 ( talk) 18:47, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
This may sound random, but Wikipedia led me astray on my home work and I should try to prevent it for others. The given max size in: "The actual maximum was 8,847,360 bytes, with 7 singly-indirect blocks and 1 doubly-indirect block; PWB/UNIX 1.0's variant had 8 singly-indirect blocks, making the maximum 524,288 bytes or half a MiB." is incorrect. According to the Version 6 Manual, http://wwwlehre.dhbw-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/v6/doc/V/fs.html, the max size is 32, but cannot be larger than 16 bue to only storing 24-bits of filesize info in each inode rather than 25. The 8,847,360 number obtained above was the result of calculating it with 4 byte addresses, which is obviously incorrect given the definition in the manual. Vkgfx ( talk) 06:00, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
CoLinux is a port of the linux kernel. It allows running Linux natively under Windows. Therefore it is possible to use XFS, ReiserFS and ext3 in Windows as described here. Maybe this is mentionable? -- Olytibar ( talk) 05:42, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
I am going to add more information on Amiga OS. It has information on the first table but none on the others. If anybody has objections to this, post them here and soon. In-Correct ( talk) 00:05, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
I notice that "George 2" appears as a file system, though without any reference or link. I don't know anything about GEORGE 2 but I did use GEORGE 3 and so I know that its filestore was very significant, having automatic volume management with backups, versioning etc. Were these the same filesystem or not? The GEORGE 3 one should certainly appear in the table, IMHO.
George 1 and 2 were really just batch job dispatch systems that sat on top of a standard ICL executive. You could use them or not, they were just slightly more privileged standard processes. George 3 was a complete operating system that took over the entire machine. One could only run George 3 on the larger "West Gorton" (and later "Stevenage") ICL machines that had extended branch mode addressing. 82.68.205.1 ( talk) 18:16, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
There is a wikipedia entry about GEORGE - GEORGE_(operating_system) - that refers to online GEORGE 3 documentation including a description of the filestore http://www.icl1900.co.uk/g3/filestor.html 131.111.85.79 ( talk) 09:40, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Many people coming to the page are only interested in comparing current Files Systems to decide which to use. However, because all of the comparison tables are multiple screens long and compare every file system that has existed, they find the page to be mostly useless. We need a way to show only current information for those who want it, in order to increase utility. A method for allowing the viewer to sort information and suppress what they don't need would also be good.
This is a general comment applicable to all comparison articles. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.142.206.28 ( talk) 22:40, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
The purpose of the field 'Original Operating System' is not clear. I would assume that it applies to the Operating System/s the Filesystem first appeared in. However, the field does not currently appear to reflect this. I have removed some anachronisms ie Windows pre NT (Windows v1 - 3.1 were not operating systems), and Mac OS X pre 1999, Linux pre 1990. There appear to be some other issues, eg Joilet support was not originally present in Mac OS and required an extension to be added, ISO9660 was not included in the Amiga OS until OS3.1 (released about 1992) but was available as a third party add on), XFS was originally IRIX only and then later ported to Linux (and by this logic, virtually all the FS could have Linux listed), and no doubt more. The solution may be to have two fields, one called Original Operating System, and another listing OSes which support the filesystems. 138.25.11.181 ( talk) 03:04, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
Why aren't the values in these two columns in the scientific notation? This way the sorting by each of the columns would work correctly (now it doesn't).
512upload ( talk) 22:38, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
-
Still undone - very annoying!!!
-
I have fixed this on 20 September 2015 with edit 681972851 - 162.222.246.77 ( talk) 18:40, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
What is the maximum file size for Apple iOS, which is used in the iPhone and iPad? I've been trying to find this official fact. • Sbmeirow • Talk • 22:02, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
I would, personally, like to see comparison data between the efficiency of differing file systems, particularly in the context of what percentage of the absolute total capacity is needed for file system metadata in order for it to represent the file system itself. For example, a less space-efficient design would use a larger percentage just to store metadata, rather than actual files, and vice versa. I realise that there are often more important factors than pure efficiency; such as discoverability for diagnostics, scalability, reliability, redundancy, et al. Notes on original design goals would be useful, too, if known, such as design for file storage, database, streaming media, sequential vs random access, et al. — Lee Carré ( talk) 14:01, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
I was wondering about the {{Contradict-other|File Allocation Table|date=February 2010}} hatnote as there was no talk thread. I tracked the addition of the hatnote down to this massive edit on 16 Feb 2009. A couple of minutes after that edit is this small one by the same user. I took a look at Special:Contributions/Gzpguest and am quite concerned about that user's edit's to this article as he/she was blocked for edits to other articles and some of the user's contribution to this article was clearly an attempt to vandalize it.
I don't know if it was WP:AGF at work or the edits were overlooked. Someone corrected Gzpguest's change of ReiserFS to MurderFS but an edit battle of sorts started with people attempting to re-insert MurderFS wording and it looks like most of the Gzpguest contribution snuck through including the hat note that got my attention today.
I don't have time to do a blow-by-blow check of what Gzpguest modified in those two edits against the current article but believe we need to revert all information that this user added/removed to the article. Hopefully someone's got the time for that thankless task. I'll start by removing the hat note. -- Marc Kupper| talk 07:34, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
The articles says all Unicode character except NUL and \ / : * ? " < > | are allowed, but in Linux NTFS files can contain any Unicode character except NUL and /. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.150.222.25 ( talk) 13:49, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
Is it mentioned outside its inventors' site and this page? Notability? 195.98.165.2 ( talk) 20:42, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Besides being an essentially dead OS, the column is currently useless, which all unknowns except for one single Yes. If no one objects or fills it in, I'll remove it until someone comes in with better data. Foxyshadis( talk) 09:27, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
A previous commenter has mentioned the inappropriate inclusion of George 2, which was in fact an operating system. The file system underlying George 2 (and all ICL 1900 executives/operating systems prior to George 3/4) was originally BDAS (Basic Direct Access Standards) and later UDAS (Unified Direct Access Standards). UDAS was noteworthy in providing a standard which meant that applications did not need recompilation, whatever type of direct access device they were accessing, anything from a small Twin EDS (about 1.5 megabytes, as I recall) to a large fixed disk. I am unclear to what extent the George 3 filestore was founded on UDAS, but on balance I think it was. 86.139.4.232 ( talk) 20:39, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
Why ExFAT's "year introduced" column has two dates? 2006 and 2009? it makes no sense. It was introduced in 2006 Cainamarques ( talk) 02:35, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
A merger proposal was made by Ruud Koot in January to merge List of file systems into this article but no discussion was started, so in before merging by silence...
Oppose - The differentiation between list and comparison works, they have different scopes so there is no overlap and also the resulting article would be too long Cainamarques ( talk) 05:00, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
please someone add how well the different file systems are at handling many many small files. i understand that reiserfs is good at this, and jfs is also alright, but that most file systems are not. please add this information. 41.204.77.67 ( talk) 09:04, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
Two questions that I can't find the answer to using this page:
1. What is the performance of handling high amounts of small files (up to a few dozen sector)? For example, FATxx and ReiserFS are very fast and journaling file systems (eg. NTFS) can be extremely slow.
2. How many files can be stored in one directory? For example, the only reason I'm not using FAT32 anymore is because when you put more than about 30000 files in a directory, it says disk full, while in fact only the directory is full. Exact number varies with length of filenames. --
Zom-B (
talk)
02:17, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
in praxis it is very important how good accidentally remarked files can be restored. for example fat, reiser3.6, ext2 files can be easier restored - ext3 is cruel 79.203.151.23 ( talk) 22:46, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
One more for the pot? The disc file system of the Sinclair QL launched in 1984. [1] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.81.120.218 ( talk) 09:43, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
What about less POSIX file systems? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.115.180.11 ( talk) 10:27, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
I think it would be of interest to have a column "Date range". BuSchu ( talk) 09:13, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
Does it make sense to do the effort to separate the column for resize feature in one for online and one for offline resizing. Currently, the overview is rather poor as a statement like "Online (cannot be shrunk)" does not point out whether the shrinking is not possible online (but offline it is) or not possible in general. Some information is only usable if one reads the citation source, e.g. one might think that ext4 is online shrinkable after having a look on the table, while it might make the information in the footnote more easily accessible. Krichter1 ( talk) 20:11, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
The ability to grow a UFS File system was added in FreeBSD 10 according to the Developers and many other sites and tutorials
[ [2]]
[ [3]] 89.207.120.69 ( talk) 10:25, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
A major current OS is not represented in the supported OS section: Windows 8. Whatever its lineage, Win 8 may or may not have support for file systems that could differ from Win NT and Win 9x. Yet Win NT and Win 9x are the only "Windows" columns in the "Supported operating systems" section. For a non-power or non-historically-knowledgeable current Windows user, this supported OS section seems out of date. 169.234.72.254 ( talk) 19:49, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
... of 4,096 what? UTF-8 coded Characters? Or Bytes? -- 91.15.18.34 ( talk) 06:04, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
My math teacher would have a fit if she saw this. "ALWAYS use units, even on Wikipeia" 74.243.139.75 ( talk) 18:04, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
The massive edit on 24 July 2015 (-42,930 characters) removed a lot of information and reformatted pretty much everything. All the ext filesystems had their "Allowable characters in directory entries" changed from "Any byte except NUL and /" to "Any byte except NUL". I believe this is in error. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9847288/is-it-possible-to-use-in-a-filename and the function "link_path_walk" in the source.
Thoughts or arguments? I propose the change be reverted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.222.246.77 ( talk) 16:14, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
It surprised me that UDF was listed as not supporting sparse files. I have had success on FreeBSD and OS X with this in the past, in fact very long ago. The simplest way to do sparse files is with short_ad (Short Allocation Descriptor) marked 2 (extent not recorded and not allocated). Since two bits are needed for the type you have 30 bits left for the size. Assuming 512 block size, this permits holes of up to 1GB. Possibly linux or other OSes does not implement sparse file support or ls does not report it correctly, but at least when I tried it it worked in the naive manner of seeking to create the holes. Also this will work in any UDF version and any compliant implementation will return zeros on reading it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.225.136.61 ( talk) 18:36, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
As SSDs have become commonplace some mention of features contributing to relative suitability of different file systems for use with SSDs and/or file system features for taking advantage of SSDs, would be welcome. -- Ericfluger ( talk) 15:46, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Inclusion of the Hammer file system from Dragonfly BSD would be welcome. ( HAMMER) -- Ericfluger ( talk) 16:16, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Regarding File capabilities, HAMMER has the following: TriTachionTertiary ( talk) 16:00, 24 August 2017 (UTC) (table shows up at the end of the page (!?)) — Preceding unsigned comment added by TriTachionTertiary ( talk • contribs) 16:04, 24 August 2017 (UTC) (HAMMER row added, removing table as it is shown in the wrong place) TriTachionTertiary ( talk) 23:25, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
While there's no room for details, it might be helpful to call attention to file systems with significant differences between multiple implementations (UFS) or with different on-disk formats (CP/M). Footnotes with links to the in-depth articles might do it. -- Ericfluger ( talk) 16:21, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
This page states that XFS was introduced in 1994, but the main XFS article says 1993. Which is it? Paulej ( talk) 05:57, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
I would appreciate a column about the maximum number of entries per directory. Actually, this page is referenced from a serverfault question adressing this information (which is of course serverfaults fault) - Peter W. 85.176.72.158 ( talk) 14:16, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
JFS does support online grow, it does NOT support offline grow. I know it seems weird, but this is how it works. To online grow JFS partition one has to run the following command:
mount -oremount,resize /dev/sda1
The resize option is invalid without remount option.
# lvcreate -n test /dev/Arch -L 20M Logical volume "test" created
mkfs.jfs /dev/Arch/test mkfs.jfs version 1.1.12, 24-Aug-2007 Warning! All data on device /dev/Arch/test will be lost!
Continue? (Y/N) y
Format completed successfully.
20480 kilobytes total disk space.
# lvresize -L +10M /dev/Arch/test Rounding up size to full physical extent 12,00 MiB Extending logical volume test to 32,00 MiB Logical volume test successfully resized
mount -oresize /dev/Arch/test /mnt/1 mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/Arch-test
^^^^ this command proofs that offline resize is not possible
# mount /dev/Arch/test /mnt/1
# mount -oresize,remount /dev/Arch/test
# df /dev/Arch/test Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on none 4086148 516 4085632 1% /dev
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.206.112.7 ( talk) 12:20, 26 March 2017 (UTC) JaZ99
The File capabilities list is missing a column about file content/user data checksums. This would include ZFS, ReFS, NILFS, HAMMER (entire row to be added) and Btrfs - but not APFS, which only does metadata checksums. Am I missing one? TriTachionTertiary ( talk) 15:49, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
OrangeFS should be added to this page — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.107.156.197 ( talk) 17:10, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
APFS accepts only valid UTF-8 encoded filenames for creation, and preserves both case and normalization of the filename on disk in all variants. [...] APFS doesn’t allow files to be created with filenames that contain unassigned codepoints in the Unicode 9.0 standard, whereas HFS+ does. [1]
References
In my opinion the added "software license" column by Tim@ is misleading. NTFS is listed as GPL, however none of the FAT variants are. Everything implemented in any BSD and Linux would have to be listed under two licenses, e.g. the ISO 9660 Fs. HAMMER (from DragonflyBSD) is listed as "Proprietary", which is wrong. Same for UFS2. Where the links just crawled and searched for a mention of any license?
I would argue that a "license" does not make sense for a file system, especially since most are tighly integrated into an OS. In the end this just lists the licenses of the implementing OSes, with few exceptions (ZFS). The Patent situation (see exFAT) might be more relevant. TriTachionTertiary ( talk) 15:24, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
While I think license is an interesting and important property of a filesystem, it seems to me that license is not relevant to the filesystem so much as the code that implements it. The filesystem itself is either open (i.e., published standard) or proprietary (but possibly reverse engineered), either patent encumbered or patent free. If I recall correctly, NTFS is not GPL, and not open, but it has GPL implementations that came from reverse engineering. According to NTFS, it has multiple proprietary and GPL implementations, so calling it GPL is clearly misleading -- I suppose you could list it as both GPL and proprietary, unless I'm wrong and Microsoft published NTFS specifications under GPL. -- ssd ( talk)
For pretty much all the reasons stated in this thread as well as WP:BOLD, I'm removing it again. The column header indicates "most permissive implementation" but the entries clearly don't follow suit. Most of the file systems listed as "proprietary" would otherwise be listed under open source licenses (Unix v6, v7, FAT, Rock Ridge, ISO 9660, APFS...). It's rather ridiculous, and I think the article is better off without the misleading information. -- Chungy ( talk) 21:41, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
At least two filesystems that are quite commonly used in embedded space are missing from this page: SquashFS and UBIFS. Keyakakushi46 ( talk) 13:28, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
Yaffs is also missing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.5.216.234 ( talk) 23:11, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
Are APFS resizing capabilities (online/offline grow/shrink) known yet? I found this article. 46.117.131.56 ( talk) 20:34, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
EDIT: I also found this now. 46.117.131.56 ( talk) 20:37, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
I came here to see which other file systems (still) support hard links to directories (HFS+ yes, APFS no longer)... — RFST ( talk) 06:06, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Columns have been added for ReactOS and Redox, and while I can appreciate enthusiasm that their fans engender, I don't believe either of these constitute a major operating system as of now, and are just minor hobbyist projects instead. I don't believe they deserve to be listed on this page. Thoughts? -- Chungy ( talk) 21:10, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
Is there a reason why NFS is not included? 88.133.199.106 ( talk) 09:13, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
I reviewed the posix wikipedia article for posix and did not find any reference to file permissions.
POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interfaces (API), along with command line shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility (portability) with variants of Unix and other operating systems.
Is there such a thing?
Flash_file_systems Should be included.
+++++
https://github.com/littlefs-project/littlefs
Is it common enough or of enough interest to include?
DGerman ( talk) 16:07, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
A flash file system is a file system designed for storing files on flash memory–based storage devices. While flash file systems are closely related to file systems in general, they are optimized for the nature and characteristics of flash memory (such as to avoid write amplification), and for use in particular operating systems.
It seems that source 27 for the ReFS max filesize has changed, it now reports a max filesize of 35PB instead of 16EiB. Checking the Internet Archive it did indeed previously report 18EB, which is approximately 16EiB. I'm pretty sure the new change is wrong on microsoft's side, since source 25 still reports 16EiB (2^64 - 1 bytes). Funnily, both are microsoft sources.
There generally seems to be a dispute/misinformation regarding the maximum filesize. The german wikipedia currently reports a maximum filesize of 262144 EiB - 1 byte, probably the source is wrong here as well. Jkhsjdhjs ( talk) 00:39, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
Case Preserving should be replaced with Form Preserving or similar. In its current form it might be misunderstood to mean exact preservation of input. HFS+ for example, to the best of my knowledge, does not preserve the input while being case preserving. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.116.11.227 ( talk) 14:00, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
In the Metadata table, we need a Modification Timestamp, and the "Last metadata change timestamps" column might need to be clearer as to what it means.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.116.11.227 ( talk) 14:00, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
We maybe should add a column for crash-consistency for each filesystem. It is a kinda important information. Does finality of writes exist, even if the server crashes exactly after it told the application the write/sync completed? Will it damage the filesystem and require fsck? Will it "just work" after a reboot? Agowa ( talk) 10:06, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
Information about how filesystems deal with being simultaneously mounted on multiple server I.E. accessed concurrently by multiple systems would be important. Especially nowerdays as everything is moving to more and more "cloud-philosophy". Only a few filesystems support RW access from multiple independent servers to the same shared backing block device. Many/Most however support single RW and multiple RO access just fine. And only a few don't support any concurrency at all. And in cases of where single RW and multiple RO access works, it should be noted if that is enforced by the filesystem (e.g. by checking timestamps) or not.
This kind of safety is often also referred to as shared-disk file system. As formerly stated, such setups are very commonly used for: backup purposes (backup server has a RO mount of the production filesystem), server rooms and centers that have a dedicated storage network (SAN), virtual machines, ... Agowa ( talk) 10:15, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
The limits in this article are not the same as in the ReFS article. The limit is 35PB. Can someone verify it and fix? ויקיטכני ( talk) 19:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the actual term for these are, APFS calls them 'containers', btrfs 'subvolumes', zfs 'datasets', but it's the support for multiple virtual file systems, backed by the same partition on the same block device.
Would it be worth it to add another column on the support tables for these? Foxtdev ( talk) 16:52, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
APFS calls them 'containers'APFS calls a disk or partition (or a RAID group) a "container", with "volumes" containing file systems inside it (and there can also a be "volume group" within a container, with multiple volumes in the volume group), at least according to Disk Utility on macOS Ventura. So the name for a file system in APFS appears to be "volume", not "container".
it's the support for multiple virtual file systemsUnfortunately, virtual file system already has a different meaning, so it's not really the right choice of name.
backed by the same partition on the same block deviceWith ZFS, a zpool can have more than one vdev, and a vdev can have multiple physical devices. As noted, macOS supports RAID, so a container can also consist of multiple physical devices, and, given Linux's LVM, the same is presumably true of whatever btrfs subvolumes are contained in.
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Right now this article is among others split into
But as it is right now it is inconsistently applied:
We should rename the sections and/or restructure the article so that the subsections actually make sense.
Kwinzman ( talk) 17:08, 30 October 2021 (UTC)
Solaris doesn't support Lustre and incorrectly has a Yes box. See Sun's own page or Wikipedia's page. Aolcarton ( talk) 17:59, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
The Limits section on NTFS states "Allowable characters in directory entries" are "Any Unicode except NUL, /". I believe this is incorrect. As stated in the Microsoft Naming a File page ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx), it clearly states
That almost any character is supported, except for the following:
< > : " / \ | ? *
We discovered this limitation while backing up files from an HFS+ file system to an NTFS 6.0 file system. The HFS+ system had a carriage return (decimal value 13) embedded in the file name.
-- Jamercee ( talk) 20:56, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
The wikipedia article on NTFS states that "Allowed characters in filenames" in "Posix namespace" is "any UTF-16 code unit (case sensitive) except U+0000 (NUL) and / (slash)" and we are here to compare Filesystem so we must not care of Win32 limitations.
-- 14:18, 29 September 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.67.232.57 ( talk)
I don't think I was clear in my original assertion. While copying files from an HFS+ filesystem to an NTFS filesystem we discovered that carriage return characters were NOT allowed while writting to the NTFS file system. Clearly Carriage-Return characters should have fallen within the range "Any Unicode except NUL, /". It would seem the limitation section should be expanded to encompass the true list of liminations, no?
Jamercee ( talk) 20:05, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Looks like youre confusing what your OS or software app allows with what NTFS allows
82.31.207.100 (
talk)
23:25, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
Another limits that seems to be wrong (in contrast to page on ntfs and info on ntfs.com): max. filename length is 255 UTF16 code-points, not 226. Is this a limit yhat evolved over time in different NTFS versions?
82.247.156.143 (
talk)
08:36, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
Also just mentioning in passing that Windows XP (presumably NT also) imposes a limit of 259 characters on the full path name but I'm not sure if that is a limitation imposed by NTFS or not. 150.101.105.182 ( talk) 04:24, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
Please provide reference for UFS2's support of block journaling. I cannot find one.
Moniker117 ( talk) 22:19, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
I've been looking around and here's some updates:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5093/fsoverview-43?l=en&a=view&q=ufs+logging
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/geom-gjournal.html
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#Journaling
http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-90950/ch02s05.html
I do not doubt that I am missing more operating systems. However, based on the above list, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and HP-UX appear to use UFS, but only FreeBSD has data level journaling support. I did not expect one file system to have such variation on one particular feature. It seems fair to me that it should read "No" for both "block journaling" and "meta-data only journaling" under both UFS and UFS2 while having a comment to indicate that certain operating systems implement different levels of journaling support. Any thoughts?
Moniker117 ( talk) 04:09, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Correction on FreeBSD, the GEOM implementation of journaling appears to be filesystem independent. Therefore, it is not a UFS or UFS2 feature.
Moniker117 ( talk) 14:36, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
NetBSD offers journaling on FFSv2 (UFS2) in recent kernels compiled with options WAPBL; mount FFSv2 volumes with the 'log' option to use this feature. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.83.37.40 ( talk) 03:19, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
Guys, journalling is a feature of filesystem _implementation_, while UFS has many of them. Solaris UFS has journalling. Other UFS implementations don't, except for FreeBSD and NetBSD ones, which seem to be done independently to each other. So, it is unclear whether we can say that UFS implements journalling.
However, UFS2 tends to refer to the current FreeBSD implementation of UFS, which definitely has journalling. Trasz ( talk) 12:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
Incidentally, the UFS logging in Solaris starts a long time before Solaris 7. In it's original incarnation, it required Disksuite and the logging was on to separate logging devices called trans meta logging. By Solaris 7, the log devices became invisible log files within the filesystem, and it was being bundled for free with the base OS, so it started being more widely known. 81.187.162.109 ( talk) 06:39, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
Online shrink/grow for HFS+ are currently listed as "unknown". The Boot Camp Assistant allows shrinking (when you create a Windows partition) and growing (when you delete one) of the running system's HFS+ partition. I don't know whether this is implemented in the FS driver or if it's a hack implemented somehow else... 24.60.192.190 ( talk) 23:12, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
The two tables for Metadata and Features, ReiserFS (which I assume is of the version 3) has none of the discussed properties ('No' for every single item). While I am no expert in file systems and ReiserFS in specific, this seems to be contradicting the page of ReiserFS, which states that one of the most publicised features of ReiserFS is "Metadata-only journalling". This suggests ReiserFS should have the minimal metadata for the purpose of system journalling. Besides, the table Features should otherwise have at least the Metadata journalling set to 'Yes' for ReiserFS. I have also checked earlier versions of this page (beginning of this year), and found that the tables were indicating many different properties for ReiserFS.
Obviously, vandalism has happened to this page recently. The maintainer of this page please restore the page to the proper state. It is much appreciated.
125.253.12.53 (
talk)
14:34, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
The page about Extended attribute does state that ReiserFS, at least in recent versions, does feature xattr / metadata support! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zuckerberg ( talk • contribs) 13:17, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount states that ACLs are supported in reiserfs. –
84.169.112.96 (
talk)
22:57, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
There is also the text “Full block journaling for ReiserFS was not added to Linux 2.6.8 for obvious reasons.” To me, the reasons are not obvious. That should be expanded upon, or some reference given. –
84.169.112.96 (
talk)
23:04, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
I was just reading about WinFS on it's own WikiPedia page, and was wondering how it compared to all these other file systems. It's not here. Oh well. I think it would be nice to have here. 71.174.4.229 ( talk) 20:41, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
The link given is broken, does anyone have a backup for the driver that allows NTFS to be used with Windows 95/98? I could really use it. Coolgamer ( talk) 03:43, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
There does not exist any NTFS 6.0 ! There are only system extentions of Windows NT 6.0 (Vista/2008) but inside the specifications of the current NTFS 3.1
I've added a new column to the features table to cover deduplication. I've filled in what I know of existing or being in development, but this leaves a lot of unknown entries. I suspect that all of the unknown's are really no but I don't have the knowledge to say for sure. Darrenmoffat ( talk) 11:38, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
I've Added/Updated Tables 1 and 2 for exFAT and TexFAT. But these 2 FS types should be added to tables:
Also Table 6 OS Support Needs Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 break out (maybe in the same column?) Frankk74 ( talk) 06:52, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
Sorting across the tables should be refined or made more consistent? Any thoughts?
Why there is "NO" for ReiserFS & Ext? for File Creation Time Stamps? I feel that this article is worthless since it contains obviously erroneous information. Might someone fix that or delete the article? -- 82.113.121.154 ( talk) 21:00, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
My understanding is that these do not give you file creation time stamps. Instead you get the last inode update timestamp. Initially this corresponds to the creation time, but later changes (such as to file metadata) may change that timestamp, without modifying the underlying file data. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.105.130.254 ( talk) 05:33, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
It would be interesting to have some comparison of market share or some other usage statistic, either here or on file system. -- Beland ( talk) 14:29, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
It might, indeed. However, as file systems are hardly ‘products’ in the original sense (more like an abstract design), then the concept of ‘market’ is difficult to apply. This would be like having ‘market share’ for natural languages, as such. How would such data be collected, anyway? You've then got statistical analysis problems; for example: how should someone using multiple file systems be counted? They're not mutually exclusive, via partitioning. — Lee Carré ( talk) 13:54, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
I feel that this table would be much more useful if it did not list any filesystems until they are supported by more than one OS. After all, while long list of special purpose linux filesystems is interesting, it seems like it perhaps defeats the purpose of this table? Why not focus on Cross-OS support, perhaps even labeling it such instead? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.162.99.237 ( talk) 19:15, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
Would it make sense to add more mobile OSs? Android? — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
50.157.95.208 (
talk)
09:43, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
According to http://www.freebsd.org/projects/bigdisk/index.html, UFS2 file and volume limit is 2^73, not a "Yobibyte". -- Eike sauer ( talk) 08:56, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
I just noticed this article uses lot of IEC prefixes such as EiB but WP:MOSNUM states the IEC prefixes are not to be used except in a few conditions that are not met by this article. I think changing the article to use familiar prefixes would be an improvement. 217.213.60.238 ( talk) 18:47, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
This may sound random, but Wikipedia led me astray on my home work and I should try to prevent it for others. The given max size in: "The actual maximum was 8,847,360 bytes, with 7 singly-indirect blocks and 1 doubly-indirect block; PWB/UNIX 1.0's variant had 8 singly-indirect blocks, making the maximum 524,288 bytes or half a MiB." is incorrect. According to the Version 6 Manual, http://wwwlehre.dhbw-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/v6/doc/V/fs.html, the max size is 32, but cannot be larger than 16 bue to only storing 24-bits of filesize info in each inode rather than 25. The 8,847,360 number obtained above was the result of calculating it with 4 byte addresses, which is obviously incorrect given the definition in the manual. Vkgfx ( talk) 06:00, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
CoLinux is a port of the linux kernel. It allows running Linux natively under Windows. Therefore it is possible to use XFS, ReiserFS and ext3 in Windows as described here. Maybe this is mentionable? -- Olytibar ( talk) 05:42, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
I am going to add more information on Amiga OS. It has information on the first table but none on the others. If anybody has objections to this, post them here and soon. In-Correct ( talk) 00:05, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
I notice that "George 2" appears as a file system, though without any reference or link. I don't know anything about GEORGE 2 but I did use GEORGE 3 and so I know that its filestore was very significant, having automatic volume management with backups, versioning etc. Were these the same filesystem or not? The GEORGE 3 one should certainly appear in the table, IMHO.
George 1 and 2 were really just batch job dispatch systems that sat on top of a standard ICL executive. You could use them or not, they were just slightly more privileged standard processes. George 3 was a complete operating system that took over the entire machine. One could only run George 3 on the larger "West Gorton" (and later "Stevenage") ICL machines that had extended branch mode addressing. 82.68.205.1 ( talk) 18:16, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
There is a wikipedia entry about GEORGE - GEORGE_(operating_system) - that refers to online GEORGE 3 documentation including a description of the filestore http://www.icl1900.co.uk/g3/filestor.html 131.111.85.79 ( talk) 09:40, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Many people coming to the page are only interested in comparing current Files Systems to decide which to use. However, because all of the comparison tables are multiple screens long and compare every file system that has existed, they find the page to be mostly useless. We need a way to show only current information for those who want it, in order to increase utility. A method for allowing the viewer to sort information and suppress what they don't need would also be good.
This is a general comment applicable to all comparison articles. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.142.206.28 ( talk) 22:40, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
The purpose of the field 'Original Operating System' is not clear. I would assume that it applies to the Operating System/s the Filesystem first appeared in. However, the field does not currently appear to reflect this. I have removed some anachronisms ie Windows pre NT (Windows v1 - 3.1 were not operating systems), and Mac OS X pre 1999, Linux pre 1990. There appear to be some other issues, eg Joilet support was not originally present in Mac OS and required an extension to be added, ISO9660 was not included in the Amiga OS until OS3.1 (released about 1992) but was available as a third party add on), XFS was originally IRIX only and then later ported to Linux (and by this logic, virtually all the FS could have Linux listed), and no doubt more. The solution may be to have two fields, one called Original Operating System, and another listing OSes which support the filesystems. 138.25.11.181 ( talk) 03:04, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
Why aren't the values in these two columns in the scientific notation? This way the sorting by each of the columns would work correctly (now it doesn't).
512upload ( talk) 22:38, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
-
Still undone - very annoying!!!
-
I have fixed this on 20 September 2015 with edit 681972851 - 162.222.246.77 ( talk) 18:40, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
What is the maximum file size for Apple iOS, which is used in the iPhone and iPad? I've been trying to find this official fact. • Sbmeirow • Talk • 22:02, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
I would, personally, like to see comparison data between the efficiency of differing file systems, particularly in the context of what percentage of the absolute total capacity is needed for file system metadata in order for it to represent the file system itself. For example, a less space-efficient design would use a larger percentage just to store metadata, rather than actual files, and vice versa. I realise that there are often more important factors than pure efficiency; such as discoverability for diagnostics, scalability, reliability, redundancy, et al. Notes on original design goals would be useful, too, if known, such as design for file storage, database, streaming media, sequential vs random access, et al. — Lee Carré ( talk) 14:01, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
I was wondering about the {{Contradict-other|File Allocation Table|date=February 2010}} hatnote as there was no talk thread. I tracked the addition of the hatnote down to this massive edit on 16 Feb 2009. A couple of minutes after that edit is this small one by the same user. I took a look at Special:Contributions/Gzpguest and am quite concerned about that user's edit's to this article as he/she was blocked for edits to other articles and some of the user's contribution to this article was clearly an attempt to vandalize it.
I don't know if it was WP:AGF at work or the edits were overlooked. Someone corrected Gzpguest's change of ReiserFS to MurderFS but an edit battle of sorts started with people attempting to re-insert MurderFS wording and it looks like most of the Gzpguest contribution snuck through including the hat note that got my attention today.
I don't have time to do a blow-by-blow check of what Gzpguest modified in those two edits against the current article but believe we need to revert all information that this user added/removed to the article. Hopefully someone's got the time for that thankless task. I'll start by removing the hat note. -- Marc Kupper| talk 07:34, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
The articles says all Unicode character except NUL and \ / : * ? " < > | are allowed, but in Linux NTFS files can contain any Unicode character except NUL and /. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.150.222.25 ( talk) 13:49, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
Is it mentioned outside its inventors' site and this page? Notability? 195.98.165.2 ( talk) 20:42, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Besides being an essentially dead OS, the column is currently useless, which all unknowns except for one single Yes. If no one objects or fills it in, I'll remove it until someone comes in with better data. Foxyshadis( talk) 09:27, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
A previous commenter has mentioned the inappropriate inclusion of George 2, which was in fact an operating system. The file system underlying George 2 (and all ICL 1900 executives/operating systems prior to George 3/4) was originally BDAS (Basic Direct Access Standards) and later UDAS (Unified Direct Access Standards). UDAS was noteworthy in providing a standard which meant that applications did not need recompilation, whatever type of direct access device they were accessing, anything from a small Twin EDS (about 1.5 megabytes, as I recall) to a large fixed disk. I am unclear to what extent the George 3 filestore was founded on UDAS, but on balance I think it was. 86.139.4.232 ( talk) 20:39, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
Why ExFAT's "year introduced" column has two dates? 2006 and 2009? it makes no sense. It was introduced in 2006 Cainamarques ( talk) 02:35, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
A merger proposal was made by Ruud Koot in January to merge List of file systems into this article but no discussion was started, so in before merging by silence...
Oppose - The differentiation between list and comparison works, they have different scopes so there is no overlap and also the resulting article would be too long Cainamarques ( talk) 05:00, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
please someone add how well the different file systems are at handling many many small files. i understand that reiserfs is good at this, and jfs is also alright, but that most file systems are not. please add this information. 41.204.77.67 ( talk) 09:04, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
Two questions that I can't find the answer to using this page:
1. What is the performance of handling high amounts of small files (up to a few dozen sector)? For example, FATxx and ReiserFS are very fast and journaling file systems (eg. NTFS) can be extremely slow.
2. How many files can be stored in one directory? For example, the only reason I'm not using FAT32 anymore is because when you put more than about 30000 files in a directory, it says disk full, while in fact only the directory is full. Exact number varies with length of filenames. --
Zom-B (
talk)
02:17, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
in praxis it is very important how good accidentally remarked files can be restored. for example fat, reiser3.6, ext2 files can be easier restored - ext3 is cruel 79.203.151.23 ( talk) 22:46, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
One more for the pot? The disc file system of the Sinclair QL launched in 1984. [1] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.81.120.218 ( talk) 09:43, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
What about less POSIX file systems? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.115.180.11 ( talk) 10:27, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
I think it would be of interest to have a column "Date range". BuSchu ( talk) 09:13, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
Does it make sense to do the effort to separate the column for resize feature in one for online and one for offline resizing. Currently, the overview is rather poor as a statement like "Online (cannot be shrunk)" does not point out whether the shrinking is not possible online (but offline it is) or not possible in general. Some information is only usable if one reads the citation source, e.g. one might think that ext4 is online shrinkable after having a look on the table, while it might make the information in the footnote more easily accessible. Krichter1 ( talk) 20:11, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
The ability to grow a UFS File system was added in FreeBSD 10 according to the Developers and many other sites and tutorials
[ [2]]
[ [3]] 89.207.120.69 ( talk) 10:25, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
A major current OS is not represented in the supported OS section: Windows 8. Whatever its lineage, Win 8 may or may not have support for file systems that could differ from Win NT and Win 9x. Yet Win NT and Win 9x are the only "Windows" columns in the "Supported operating systems" section. For a non-power or non-historically-knowledgeable current Windows user, this supported OS section seems out of date. 169.234.72.254 ( talk) 19:49, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
... of 4,096 what? UTF-8 coded Characters? Or Bytes? -- 91.15.18.34 ( talk) 06:04, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
My math teacher would have a fit if she saw this. "ALWAYS use units, even on Wikipeia" 74.243.139.75 ( talk) 18:04, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
The massive edit on 24 July 2015 (-42,930 characters) removed a lot of information and reformatted pretty much everything. All the ext filesystems had their "Allowable characters in directory entries" changed from "Any byte except NUL and /" to "Any byte except NUL". I believe this is in error. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9847288/is-it-possible-to-use-in-a-filename and the function "link_path_walk" in the source.
Thoughts or arguments? I propose the change be reverted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.222.246.77 ( talk) 16:14, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
It surprised me that UDF was listed as not supporting sparse files. I have had success on FreeBSD and OS X with this in the past, in fact very long ago. The simplest way to do sparse files is with short_ad (Short Allocation Descriptor) marked 2 (extent not recorded and not allocated). Since two bits are needed for the type you have 30 bits left for the size. Assuming 512 block size, this permits holes of up to 1GB. Possibly linux or other OSes does not implement sparse file support or ls does not report it correctly, but at least when I tried it it worked in the naive manner of seeking to create the holes. Also this will work in any UDF version and any compliant implementation will return zeros on reading it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.225.136.61 ( talk) 18:36, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
As SSDs have become commonplace some mention of features contributing to relative suitability of different file systems for use with SSDs and/or file system features for taking advantage of SSDs, would be welcome. -- Ericfluger ( talk) 15:46, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Inclusion of the Hammer file system from Dragonfly BSD would be welcome. ( HAMMER) -- Ericfluger ( talk) 16:16, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Regarding File capabilities, HAMMER has the following: TriTachionTertiary ( talk) 16:00, 24 August 2017 (UTC) (table shows up at the end of the page (!?)) — Preceding unsigned comment added by TriTachionTertiary ( talk • contribs) 16:04, 24 August 2017 (UTC) (HAMMER row added, removing table as it is shown in the wrong place) TriTachionTertiary ( talk) 23:25, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
While there's no room for details, it might be helpful to call attention to file systems with significant differences between multiple implementations (UFS) or with different on-disk formats (CP/M). Footnotes with links to the in-depth articles might do it. -- Ericfluger ( talk) 16:21, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
This page states that XFS was introduced in 1994, but the main XFS article says 1993. Which is it? Paulej ( talk) 05:57, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
I would appreciate a column about the maximum number of entries per directory. Actually, this page is referenced from a serverfault question adressing this information (which is of course serverfaults fault) - Peter W. 85.176.72.158 ( talk) 14:16, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
JFS does support online grow, it does NOT support offline grow. I know it seems weird, but this is how it works. To online grow JFS partition one has to run the following command:
mount -oremount,resize /dev/sda1
The resize option is invalid without remount option.
# lvcreate -n test /dev/Arch -L 20M Logical volume "test" created
mkfs.jfs /dev/Arch/test mkfs.jfs version 1.1.12, 24-Aug-2007 Warning! All data on device /dev/Arch/test will be lost!
Continue? (Y/N) y
Format completed successfully.
20480 kilobytes total disk space.
# lvresize -L +10M /dev/Arch/test Rounding up size to full physical extent 12,00 MiB Extending logical volume test to 32,00 MiB Logical volume test successfully resized
mount -oresize /dev/Arch/test /mnt/1 mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/Arch-test
^^^^ this command proofs that offline resize is not possible
# mount /dev/Arch/test /mnt/1
# mount -oresize,remount /dev/Arch/test
# df /dev/Arch/test Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on none 4086148 516 4085632 1% /dev
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.206.112.7 ( talk) 12:20, 26 March 2017 (UTC) JaZ99
The File capabilities list is missing a column about file content/user data checksums. This would include ZFS, ReFS, NILFS, HAMMER (entire row to be added) and Btrfs - but not APFS, which only does metadata checksums. Am I missing one? TriTachionTertiary ( talk) 15:49, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
OrangeFS should be added to this page — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.107.156.197 ( talk) 17:10, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
APFS accepts only valid UTF-8 encoded filenames for creation, and preserves both case and normalization of the filename on disk in all variants. [...] APFS doesn’t allow files to be created with filenames that contain unassigned codepoints in the Unicode 9.0 standard, whereas HFS+ does. [1]
References
In my opinion the added "software license" column by Tim@ is misleading. NTFS is listed as GPL, however none of the FAT variants are. Everything implemented in any BSD and Linux would have to be listed under two licenses, e.g. the ISO 9660 Fs. HAMMER (from DragonflyBSD) is listed as "Proprietary", which is wrong. Same for UFS2. Where the links just crawled and searched for a mention of any license?
I would argue that a "license" does not make sense for a file system, especially since most are tighly integrated into an OS. In the end this just lists the licenses of the implementing OSes, with few exceptions (ZFS). The Patent situation (see exFAT) might be more relevant. TriTachionTertiary ( talk) 15:24, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
While I think license is an interesting and important property of a filesystem, it seems to me that license is not relevant to the filesystem so much as the code that implements it. The filesystem itself is either open (i.e., published standard) or proprietary (but possibly reverse engineered), either patent encumbered or patent free. If I recall correctly, NTFS is not GPL, and not open, but it has GPL implementations that came from reverse engineering. According to NTFS, it has multiple proprietary and GPL implementations, so calling it GPL is clearly misleading -- I suppose you could list it as both GPL and proprietary, unless I'm wrong and Microsoft published NTFS specifications under GPL. -- ssd ( talk)
For pretty much all the reasons stated in this thread as well as WP:BOLD, I'm removing it again. The column header indicates "most permissive implementation" but the entries clearly don't follow suit. Most of the file systems listed as "proprietary" would otherwise be listed under open source licenses (Unix v6, v7, FAT, Rock Ridge, ISO 9660, APFS...). It's rather ridiculous, and I think the article is better off without the misleading information. -- Chungy ( talk) 21:41, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
At least two filesystems that are quite commonly used in embedded space are missing from this page: SquashFS and UBIFS. Keyakakushi46 ( talk) 13:28, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
Yaffs is also missing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.5.216.234 ( talk) 23:11, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
Are APFS resizing capabilities (online/offline grow/shrink) known yet? I found this article. 46.117.131.56 ( talk) 20:34, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
EDIT: I also found this now. 46.117.131.56 ( talk) 20:37, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
I came here to see which other file systems (still) support hard links to directories (HFS+ yes, APFS no longer)... — RFST ( talk) 06:06, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Columns have been added for ReactOS and Redox, and while I can appreciate enthusiasm that their fans engender, I don't believe either of these constitute a major operating system as of now, and are just minor hobbyist projects instead. I don't believe they deserve to be listed on this page. Thoughts? -- Chungy ( talk) 21:10, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
Is there a reason why NFS is not included? 88.133.199.106 ( talk) 09:13, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
I reviewed the posix wikipedia article for posix and did not find any reference to file permissions.
POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interfaces (API), along with command line shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility (portability) with variants of Unix and other operating systems.
Is there such a thing?
Flash_file_systems Should be included.
+++++
https://github.com/littlefs-project/littlefs
Is it common enough or of enough interest to include?
DGerman ( talk) 16:07, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
A flash file system is a file system designed for storing files on flash memory–based storage devices. While flash file systems are closely related to file systems in general, they are optimized for the nature and characteristics of flash memory (such as to avoid write amplification), and for use in particular operating systems.
It seems that source 27 for the ReFS max filesize has changed, it now reports a max filesize of 35PB instead of 16EiB. Checking the Internet Archive it did indeed previously report 18EB, which is approximately 16EiB. I'm pretty sure the new change is wrong on microsoft's side, since source 25 still reports 16EiB (2^64 - 1 bytes). Funnily, both are microsoft sources.
There generally seems to be a dispute/misinformation regarding the maximum filesize. The german wikipedia currently reports a maximum filesize of 262144 EiB - 1 byte, probably the source is wrong here as well. Jkhsjdhjs ( talk) 00:39, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
Case Preserving should be replaced with Form Preserving or similar. In its current form it might be misunderstood to mean exact preservation of input. HFS+ for example, to the best of my knowledge, does not preserve the input while being case preserving. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.116.11.227 ( talk) 14:00, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
In the Metadata table, we need a Modification Timestamp, and the "Last metadata change timestamps" column might need to be clearer as to what it means.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.116.11.227 ( talk) 14:00, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
We maybe should add a column for crash-consistency for each filesystem. It is a kinda important information. Does finality of writes exist, even if the server crashes exactly after it told the application the write/sync completed? Will it damage the filesystem and require fsck? Will it "just work" after a reboot? Agowa ( talk) 10:06, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
Information about how filesystems deal with being simultaneously mounted on multiple server I.E. accessed concurrently by multiple systems would be important. Especially nowerdays as everything is moving to more and more "cloud-philosophy". Only a few filesystems support RW access from multiple independent servers to the same shared backing block device. Many/Most however support single RW and multiple RO access just fine. And only a few don't support any concurrency at all. And in cases of where single RW and multiple RO access works, it should be noted if that is enforced by the filesystem (e.g. by checking timestamps) or not.
This kind of safety is often also referred to as shared-disk file system. As formerly stated, such setups are very commonly used for: backup purposes (backup server has a RO mount of the production filesystem), server rooms and centers that have a dedicated storage network (SAN), virtual machines, ... Agowa ( talk) 10:15, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
The limits in this article are not the same as in the ReFS article. The limit is 35PB. Can someone verify it and fix? ויקיטכני ( talk) 19:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the actual term for these are, APFS calls them 'containers', btrfs 'subvolumes', zfs 'datasets', but it's the support for multiple virtual file systems, backed by the same partition on the same block device.
Would it be worth it to add another column on the support tables for these? Foxtdev ( talk) 16:52, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
APFS calls them 'containers'APFS calls a disk or partition (or a RAID group) a "container", with "volumes" containing file systems inside it (and there can also a be "volume group" within a container, with multiple volumes in the volume group), at least according to Disk Utility on macOS Ventura. So the name for a file system in APFS appears to be "volume", not "container".
it's the support for multiple virtual file systemsUnfortunately, virtual file system already has a different meaning, so it's not really the right choice of name.
backed by the same partition on the same block deviceWith ZFS, a zpool can have more than one vdev, and a vdev can have multiple physical devices. As noted, macOS supports RAID, so a container can also consist of multiple physical devices, and, given Linux's LVM, the same is presumably true of whatever btrfs subvolumes are contained in.