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I remember reading about the BeFS, and how advanced it was for its time. Can anyone who does filesystems help me remember why it was so powerful? Is anything o

I remember reading about the BeFS, and how advanced it was for its time. Can anyone who does filesystems help me remember why it was so powerful? Is anything out there now comparable? Have we surpassed BeFS? Any residual functionality that contemporary filesystems lack?

jonhohle 10y ago
It had a lot of features for the time (64-bit, journaling, etc.), but one of the most used features in BeOS was that arbitrary metadata could be attached to files, exposed in Tracker or other applications, and could be used to search for files. One of the examples of the time were scripts to take MP3 ID3 tags and store them as metadata. Email was stored as individual files on the file system, and the email client was just a Tracker window with columns displaying email relevant metadata. Spotlight on OS X supports similar metadata storage and querying, but it's built on top of HFS+, not directly into the file system (and surprise, was built by Dominic Giampaolo, who worked on BeFS, author of the linked book). WinFS claimed a lot of similar features shortly after Be was acquired, but to my knowledge, no file system has provided similar features _and_ had spextensive application support to leverage them.
- geocar 10y ago
  I think the clever bit is when a user sees their email in the file browser[1] they can mentally connect with that and start using their file system as the database that it is, building their own dynamic todo list[2] that isn't managed by any application! Almost every filesystem "supports metadata", and while I agree that application support could be better, I think the real key is getting users to use that space themselves. [1]: https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/bemail.jpg https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/bemail.jpg [2]: https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/trackerbase.gif https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/trackerbase.gif
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    BeFS's metadata support was much different from usual—it was a key/value map attached to each file. NTFS supports extended attributes and alternate data streams, which you could use to do the same thing, but none of the *nix filesystems have anything like that. What sort of metadata do you mean with “almost every filesystem ‘supports metadata’”?
    - acdha 10y ago
      JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, ext3/4, and btrfs all support extended attributes – that's become a bigger deal for things like ACLs – but along with varying size limits the share the same limitations as NTFS, HFS+, etc. of not indexing those values. That means there's no way to do a query like "file type = audio/mp3" without either walking the filesystem or querying a separate index, which removes a lot of the benefits.
      - PeCaN 10y ago
        I think NTFS can index alternate data streams¹, but yeah, I agree no filesystems are on the level that BeFS was of easy querying and versatility. ¹ I am not sure about this, but https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa364404(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... seems to suggest it
        acdha 10y ago
        I'm not sure either – it definitely did not in the past but I haven't needed to look into it for years. Things like WinFS were going to solve that the right way but since that never shipped I assume they were still relying on a bolt-on indexing service.
- Esau 10y ago
  I loved BeOS. I bought and ran versions 4.5 and 5.0 Pro. I also owned a copy of Scot Hacker's BeOS Bible; which I read front to end. I visited the BeNews and BeOS Tips websites almost everyday. As for BeFS itself, it was a pretty awesome FS. I remember I used to use a utility called MP3 Army Knife, which could copy MP3 metadata to BeFS attributes. I then used Marco Nelissen's SoundPlay (shareware which I bought) to play them; basically using Tracker or BeFS queries to generate playlists. I miss that OS.
  - mastax 10y ago
    You've likely heard of this before but Haiku[0] is a modern open source continuation of BeOS, which is almost usable. [0]: haiku-os.org
- cm3 10y ago
  And the metadata support was instantaneous, without noticeable overhead or delays. I mean, your query windows would live update as you would expect them to. Despite faster machines, this doesn't feel as instant on Linux, OS X or Windows 7 (haven't used 8 or 10).
  - acdha 10y ago
    > And the metadata support was instantaneous, without noticeable overhead or delays Seconding things: BeFS was staggeringly fast – doing a simple query in something like Outlook or Mail.app is still nowhere near the same class as either the standard BeOS mail client or PMMail, even with generations of hardware improvements. On an idle system with an SSD, a Spotlight or Windows Search / Cortana query isn't as responsive as a BeFS query was on my old Pentium 90 with 5200 RPM drives. At least some part of that is due to the fact that BeOS had a very good scheduler – I remember being impressed one time when I was transferring a lot of video off of a camera[1] building Mozilla from source, and realized that it didn't make either web browsing or email less responsive. 1. this was DV over Firewire so it wasn't a hard-realtime task but the tape made it soft-ish, and the sound change was quite noticeable when the tape drive had to spin down to wait for the host PC, which happened under Windows but never BeOS.

jonhohle 10y ago

It had a lot of features for the time (64-bit, journaling, etc.), but one of the most used features in BeOS was that arbitrary metadata could be attached to files, exposed in Tracker or other applications, and could be used to search for files. One of the examples of the time were scripts to take MP3 ID3 tags and store them as metadata. Email was stored as individual files on the file system, and the email client was just a Tracker window with columns displaying email relevant metadata. Spotlight on OS X supports similar metadata storage and querying, but it's built on top of HFS+, not directly into the file system (and surprise, was built by Dominic Giampaolo, who worked on BeFS, author of the linked book). WinFS claimed a lot of similar features shortly after Be was acquired, but to my knowledge, no file system has provided similar features _and_ had spextensive application support to leverage them.

geocar 10y ago
I think the clever bit is when a user sees their email in the file browser[1] they can mentally connect with that and start using their file system as the database that it is, building their own dynamic todo list[2] that isn't managed by any application! Almost every filesystem "supports metadata", and while I agree that application support could be better, I think the real key is getting users to use that space themselves. [1]: https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/bemail.jpg https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/bemail.jpg [2]: https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/trackerbase.gif https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/trackerbase.gif
- PeCaN 10y ago
  BeFS's metadata support was much different from usual—it was a key/value map attached to each file. NTFS supports extended attributes and alternate data streams, which you could use to do the same thing, but none of the *nix filesystems have anything like that. What sort of metadata do you mean with “almost every filesystem ‘supports metadata’”?
  - acdha 10y ago
    JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, ext3/4, and btrfs all support extended attributes – that's become a bigger deal for things like ACLs – but along with varying size limits the share the same limitations as NTFS, HFS+, etc. of not indexing those values. That means there's no way to do a query like "file type = audio/mp3" without either walking the filesystem or querying a separate index, which removes a lot of the benefits.
    - PeCaN 10y ago
      I think NTFS can index alternate data streams¹, but yeah, I agree no filesystems are on the level that BeFS was of easy querying and versatility. ¹ I am not sure about this, but https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa364404(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... seems to suggest it
      - acdha 10y ago
        I'm not sure either – it definitely did not in the past but I haven't needed to look into it for years. Things like WinFS were going to solve that the right way but since that never shipped I assume they were still relying on a bolt-on indexing service.
Esau 10y ago
I loved BeOS. I bought and ran versions 4.5 and 5.0 Pro. I also owned a copy of Scot Hacker's BeOS Bible; which I read front to end. I visited the BeNews and BeOS Tips websites almost everyday. As for BeFS itself, it was a pretty awesome FS. I remember I used to use a utility called MP3 Army Knife, which could copy MP3 metadata to BeFS attributes. I then used Marco Nelissen's SoundPlay (shareware which I bought) to play them; basically using Tracker or BeFS queries to generate playlists. I miss that OS.
- mastax 10y ago
  You've likely heard of this before but Haiku[0] is a modern open source continuation of BeOS, which is almost usable. [0]: haiku-os.org
cm3 10y ago
And the metadata support was instantaneous, without noticeable overhead or delays. I mean, your query windows would live update as you would expect them to. Despite faster machines, this doesn't feel as instant on Linux, OS X or Windows 7 (haven't used 8 or 10).
- acdha 10y ago
  > And the metadata support was instantaneous, without noticeable overhead or delays Seconding things: BeFS was staggeringly fast – doing a simple query in something like Outlook or Mail.app is still nowhere near the same class as either the standard BeOS mail client or PMMail, even with generations of hardware improvements. On an idle system with an SSD, a Spotlight or Windows Search / Cortana query isn't as responsive as a BeFS query was on my old Pentium 90 with 5200 RPM drives. At least some part of that is due to the fact that BeOS had a very good scheduler – I remember being impressed one time when I was transferring a lot of video off of a camera[1] building Mozilla from source, and realized that it didn't make either web browsing or email less responsive. 1. this was DV over Firewire so it wasn't a hard-realtime task but the tape made it soft-ish, and the sound change was quite noticeable when the tape drive had to spin down to wait for the host PC, which happened under Windows but never BeOS.