Top all-time · #2541
Dominic Giampaolo
Personal blog · nobius.orgsystemsprogramming
Dominic Giampaolo's personal blog at nobius.org covers systems and programming. Since 2009, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “Practical File System Design: The Be File System (1999) [pdf]”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Practical File System Design: The Be File System (1999) [pdf]18 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2009-01-20
- Practical File System Design with the Be File System [pdf]9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-04-05
- /~dbg/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-01-20
- /dbg/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-07-06
What Hacker News says?
Journaling filesystems don't "journal" all the activity in perpetuity. They typically just journal the changes until they're committed to disk, usually for less than a second. See http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf , section 7.2 "How Does Journaling Work?".
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets”Submitted Practical File System Design: The Be File System (1999) as a story · 154 points
HN discussion> Fun fact: Dominic Giampalo (who wrote the BeOS file system) is on the APFS team. His book "Practical File System Design" is an excellent description of a traditional UNIX file system design. May be out of print now but I think used copies turn up on Amazon. It looks like he has a PDF up on his website: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “A ZFS developer’s analysis of Apple’s new APFS file system”Submitted Practical File System Design: The Be File System (1999) [pdf] as a story · 101 points
HN discussionThe author has the pdf available on their personal site. I highly recommend reading it. It is understandable by a hobbyist in my opinion. http://www.nobius.org/dbg/
Comment linking /dbg/
on “Haiku R1/beta2 has been released”Submitted Practical File System Design with the Be File System (1999) [pdf] as a story · 57 points
HN discussionA very accessible (though dated) intro to filesystems is Practical File System Design, by Dominic Giampaolo. PDF link: http://www.nobius.org/practical-file-system-design.pdf
Comment linking /practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Writing a file system from scratch in Rust”Submitted Practical file system design with the Be File System (1999) [pdf] as a story · 47 points
HN discussionBeOS did it by writing their own filesystem. The filesystem author wrote a good book about the design and implementation, including overviews of other filesystems (eg NTFS). He has made the book available for free download at http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf Ars Technica also has a nice 2010 article: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-be... The way it implemented the…
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Haiku Project”Submitted Practical File System Design with the Be File System as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI never personally used it, but I've heard the BeFS was designed to have significant non-hierarchical use cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System : > [BeFS] includes support for extended file attributes (metadata), with indexing and querying characteristics to provide functionality similar to that of a relational database. IIRC, this was pretty hyped at the time, but they had to back away from it. I don'…
Comment linking /dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)”Submitted Practical File System Design with the Be File System [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIIRC, they hired Dominic Giampaolo to work on the file system for a while -- he was responsible for adding journaling to HFS+ and started Spotlight, which has a lot in common with BeFS's attributes. He apparently worked on a new file system for them but it never shipped. http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/
Comment linking /~dbg/
on “HFS+ is crazy”Submitted Practical File System Design [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere are various arbitrary restrictions in various filesystems and operating systems. The intention is to store smaller amounts of useful information with the file. Smaller means in the bytes/kilobytes range. For example you wouldn't store multi-gigabyte alternate language versions of a video file in its extended attributes. But you could store URLs of where to get them. Or you could attach authorship, review, date…
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “HFS+ is crazy”Submitted Practicle File System Design with the Be File System [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDominic Giampaolo who did a lot of the work on the BeOS File system has been working for Apple since around 2002: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/
Comment linking /~dbg/
on “HFS+ Bit Rot”Far better is the book by the creator of the filesystem: http://www.nobius.org/dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
Comment linking /dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Hardware Virtualization”Apple hired the author of BeFS to work for them. He has worked on Spotlight, Time Machine, Apple's file systems, etc. http://www.nobius.org/dbg/
Comment linking /dbg/
on “The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective”Also interesting: Practical File System Design with the Be File System http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective”The fact that file systems force us to organize data a into a set of named files in a fairly rigid hierarchy has been lamented since the 1970s by Ted Nelson (the man who, among other things, coined the term "hypertext") and others. However, it goes even further back than that with the critique of library indexing systems by Vannevar Bush in his seminal 1945 article As We May Think [1] that described the "Memex" as a…
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?”http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf if you are interested. It's obviously dated (1998) but still an entertaining, and insightful, read.
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “BeOS almost made Apple a different company (2015)”The filesystem was amazing. Interesting tidbit: Dominic Giampaolo, who was one of the main developers of BeFS is now engineer on the APFS team [1]. [1] http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/
Comment linking /~dbg/
on “BeOS almost made Apple a different company (2015)”I love this list, and would love to see an updated list so I can add the recommendations to my reading list :) Have you ever checked out OSTEP: Three Easy Pieces? ( http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ ) I am finding that a much more accessible, organized, and easy-to-ready resource than Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems. What do you think of it? Also, I've recently got my hands on "Practical Filesystem Design,…
Comment linking /dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “A book list for OS kernel developers and device driver writers (2006)”BeOS was great, but compare Steve Jobs' NeXT presentation (1992) to the BeOS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk NeXTSTEP is the predecessor of OS X, the rest is history. BeOS filesystem "BeFS" had extended attributes (metadata) with indexing and querying features similar to a relational database and Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips". Though Microsoft failed to complete Cairo-OS a…
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “BeOS Demo Video (1998) [video]”Yes, the author published openly a few years ago, when it got out of print. Actually, the link is to the authors site: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/index.html
Comment linking /~dbg/index.html
on “Practical File System Design: The Be File System (1999) [pdf]”Dominic Giampaolo wrote "Practical File System Design with the Be File System" which he has made freely available at: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf I found it to be well written and interesting when I was a university student first going deep on the subject. The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd Edition) by McKusick is also well written and covers some of th…
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Inferno, Part 3: Let's Make a Filesystem”Here's some info from gherkin0 back from June of 2016: gherkin0 on June 26, 2016 | next [–] > Fun fact: Dominic Giampalo (who wrote the BeOS file system) is on the APFS team. His book "Practical File System Design" is an excellent description of a traditional UNIX file system design. May be out of print now but I think used copies turn up on Amazon. It looks like he has a PDF up on his website: http://www.nobius.org…
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Apple's APFS Migration: A Feat of Engineering”I am still waiting for a database-based file system. Some filesystems like NTFS/ReFS, BeFS and afaik ReiseFS4(?) and Btrfs(?)) could be extended. Microsoft extended the NTFS fs driver with the Cairo project in the NT4/5 era: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) All of the other functions NTFS exports for the EFS driver begin with the prefix NtOfs, which presumably stands for NT Object File System. O…
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “The Sorry State of CoW File Systems”> notably Dominic Giampaolo His book on file system design is still a must-read, imo. http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
Comment linking /~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “Gary Kildall”
