[HN Gopher] HFS Origins: The Turbo File System (2017)
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       HFS Origins: The Turbo File System (2017)
        
       Author : Lammy
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2023-07-30 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (macgui.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (macgui.com)
        
       | Aloha wrote:
       | Was the classic macOS source put out at some point?
        
         | skissane wrote:
         | A large (but apparently incomplete?) chunk of the System 7.1
         | source code was leaked 10+ years ago, and isn't hard to find.
         | But AFAIK, there has never been an approved release by Apple.
         | 
         | Reading the article, my impression is the author _may_ have
         | more source code that isn't widely available. Probably, they
         | know some ex-Apple engineers who have saved code from their
         | time at Apple, and shared it with them on the condition it
         | isn't made public. I've heard of things like that happening
         | before, for other historically important closed source systems.
        
       | ksherlock wrote:
       | "I don't have any documentation yet to firmly support this
       | statement, but my impression is that the Macintosh File System
       | was based upon the Lisa file system which in turn was similar to
       | a file system developed by Xerox for its Star workstation."
       | 
       | MFS uses a linked-list for file blocks, similar to MS DOS. This
       | is not a coincidence according to folklore:
       | 
       | https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
       | 
       | "Our first file system used a simple data structure that didn't
       | scale well to large drives (in fact, it was suggested to us by
       | Bill Gates in July 1981)"
        
       | jauntywundrkind wrote:
       | > _Moreover, the Finder had to maintain the catalog in RAM to
       | keep track of folders, which were illusory. The Macintosh File
       | System was not a true hierarchical system; it only appeared to be
       | in the Finder. Folders in fact were kept as "Finder Objects" in
       | the Desktop file._
       | 
       | That is so frigging cool. JBOF, just a bunch of files. The data
       | about structure being not the responsibility, it being a flat
       | file store.
       | 
       | I'm curious how something like Ceph bluestore works, what it's
       | design is. There's metadata nodes here too I think, it's some
       | kind of dumb-ish blockstore, for limited size blocks.
        
         | sillywalk wrote:
         | My 5 minute dunning-kruger level look up:
         | 
         | Bluestore is used to directly access raw storage without the
         | overhead of a filesystem. [1][2]
         | 
         | "BlueStore uses the RocksDB' key-value database to manage
         | internal metadata, such as the mapping from object names to
         | block locations on a disk. [0]
         | 
         | [0] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-
         | us/red_hat_ceph_s...
         | 
         | [1] https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/11/06/ceph-evolution/
         | 
         | [2]
         | https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-30 23:00 UTC)