Torvalds calls Apple's file system "utter crap"

[mikec#IM]

I couldn't resist, for two reasons:

1.) Get some life back the forum
2.) I've not heard a lot of negatvies about HFS (although I haven't gone looking, either).

I for one wish they had bought BeOS, as that journaling file system was light years ahead of the offers of the time in terms of speed, recoverability, and indexing/searching/tagging/application integration.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/05/linus-torvalds-calls-apples-file-system-utter-crap/

 

[marcol]

I couldn't resist, for two reasons:

1.) Get some life back the forum
2.) I've not heard a lot of negatvies about HFS (although I haven't gone looking, either).

I for one wish they had bought BeOS, as that journaling file system was light years ahead of the offers of the time in terms of speed, recoverability, and indexing/searching/tagging/application integration.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/05/linus-torvalds-calls-apples-file-system-utter-crap/

Of course he does also say that OS X is better than Vista overall

More seriously, I guess the relevance of this to this forum hinges on what bits of OS X is in the iPhone OS. Is the file system the same?

 

[cmaier]

HFS is definitely long in the tooth.

 

[Rene Ritchie]

As a good friend of mine, and full time Linux professional said to me when he saw this, absent specifics, Torvalds comments are meaningless.

HFS+ is old, and by some miracle Apple still manages to innovate things like Time Machine, and likely given the shift to terabytes of personal (family/home) data in the HD age, Apple will have to go beyond HFS+ anyway, which may explain their dabbling with ZFS.

 

[Dieter Bohn]

IANAP (Programmer), but reading up on the delays for ZFS over on Ars Technica, I definitely get the feeling that HFS+ is going to very quickly become a bigger problem as the rest of the world gets on something more advanced.

 

[Rene Ritchie]

I keep going back to Gruber's Kremlinology comment about discussing/deciphering Apple's road-map.

They had OS X running on Intel for years before they announced the switch. They've canned products they didn't feel were right for the market that we still don't know about (yet).

It's a black box.

Who knows what other file systems, be they HFS++, ZFS, or something we've yet to hear about, running in their dark rooms?

Since they want to be the digital hub, and the data crunch is coming, I can't imagine they aren't considering it (and given the hub-bub online over ZFS a while back (i.e. http://drewthaler.blogspot.com/2007/10/zfs-hater-redux.html
vs. http://www.macjournals.com/news/2007/10/07.html#a80), I'd guess there's a lot of work going in).

(Whether this type of secrecy is good or bad is debatable, and WinFS is a perfect example of what can happen even with ridiculously pre-announced file system road maps).