[GRLUG] ext4/xfs/winfs [Was: WMNTUG Windows 7 Meeting]

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2009-09-18 at 09:30 -0400, Steve Romanow wrote:
> Bruce Smith wrote:
> > Ditto, ext4 since 9.04 (April? :)  and no problems (yet).
> > It also fixed a lot of problems I was having with xfs.
> > My VMware virtual disk was previously on a xfs partition and my XP VM
> > was so slow it was unusable.  Some research reviled problems with xfs
> > handling large files.  Now, with ext4, vmware runs at an acceptable
> > speed, and some other things seem to be faster too. 
> I get joy in the fact that while msft stumbles and is unable to roll out 
> winfs in a meaningful way for its users (first demonstrated in 2003 
> (wikipedia)), there are so many available for our needs.

I don't see the correlation;  the feature set proposed for WinFS doesn't
really have anything to do with the scalability issues addressed by
XFS/ext4/GFS.

WinFS, from when I played with it back in Longhorn, was more about
meta-data and enabling task orienting computing and the elimination of
the arbitrary hierarchical nature of filesystems - at least in relation
to application development and the user experience.  WinFS ran into many
of the same issues as [*EARLY*] versions of Beagle - basically that
doing what it intended without support from the overlying [term?]
applications is hard and the sheer amount of meta-data generated by
modern systems is enormous.  I think Tracker [the heir apparent to
Beagle] and GNOME Zeitgeist are more in the same paradigm of WinFS than
ext4.

<http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2009/09/some-pics-from-the-new-gnome-activity-journal/>
<http://live.gnome.org/GnomeZeitgeist>
<http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/>
<http://www.iola.dk/nemo/>