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by tiffanyh 3372 days ago
In all fairness to Dragonfly, Apple themselves just today released an entirely new file systems that was a complete rewrite as well.

With the advent of SSD and NVME, how you achieve maximum performance and ensure long term "disk" endurance has radically changed in recent years. You're no long write data to a physical platter anymore. Which radically changes huge fundamental assumptions in how legacy file systems were created 30-40 years ago.

So don't view a rewrite as a bad thing. It's Dragonfly being proactive and keeping up with the times.

3 comments

> Apple themselves just today released an entirely new file systems that was a complete rewrite as well.

Without CRCs or checksums on the blocks. Grr...

"Silent data corruption is real" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13851349

> Which radically changes huge fundamental assumptions in how legacy file systems were created 30-40 years ago.

Actually, it doesn't. It makes the ones that you haven't heard of interesting again. Consider the BSD 4.4 LFS, for example. The disc is written to as a circular log, with all writes going to the head of the log, which gradually works its way across the whole disc, and a cleanup mechanism emptying the tail of the log. That is global wear levelling in the file system ... in a design from 1990.

This is what you miss when you adopt the mindset that mis-uses the word "legacy" like that.

Only history proves stability.