4 ms·
Not a lot of this matters in the real world. The real shame is the shitty small file performance due to MFT contention on NTFS.
by setquk 8y ago
Not a lot of this matters in the real world. The real shame is the shitty small file performance due to MFT contention on NTFS.
- otterley 8y agoIt absolutely matters: a fair amount of software, both enterprise and consumer, already uses these features. Malware detection, for example, makes heavy use of reparse points.
- blattimwind 8y agoWindows Update and Windows Installer use NTFS transactions.
- setquk 8y agoFrom Microsoft's documentation: Microsoft strongly recommends developers utilize alternative means to achieve your application s needs. Many scenarios that TxF was developed for can be achieved through simpler and more readily available techniques. Furthermore, TxF may not be available in future versions of Microsoft Windows. For more information, and alternatives to TxF, please see Alternatives to using Transactional NTFS. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/fileio/about-transactional-ntfs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/fileio/abou...
- mehrdadn 8y agoI'm pretty convinced that documentation is BS. I could be wrong I guess, but I honestly don't see them removing TxF anytime soon. They didn't exactly build their business on breaking backwards-compatibility of APIs.
- setquk 8y agoThey've burned a lot of APIs in the last few years.
- mehrdadn 8y agoExamples?
- setquk 8y agohttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/apiindex/windows-api-list#deprecated-or-legacy-apis https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/apiindex/wi...
- mehrdadn 8y agoThey're not removed though? They're 'deprecated' as in they don't want you to depend on them, but they're still very much there and usable.
- cryptonector 8y agoZFS snapshots work well enough for that. The Sun Storage Appliance used ZFS snapshots for updates, and it worked quite well.
- otterley 8y agoDid that change recently? I haven't used Windows since XP, but back then, they used Volume Shadow Copies (VSS) for making backups used for reverting changes, not NTFS transactions.
- tjalfi 8y agoWindows Update switched to using NTFS transactions in Windows Vista.
- setquk 8y agoReparse points could be emulated at API level.
- ygra 8y agoIs the MFT even documented and available via APIs on Windows? Could NTFS (at the expense of losing backwards compatibility in the file system (which already only extends to features that have been there before)) just change how the MFT works transparently for well-behaved applications (i.e. those that do not grovel around in undocumented data structures)? Admittedly, there may still be a number of applications that decide to »optimize« a system by digging around in parts that they have reverse engineered, and those might simply corrupt the file system when running on a newer NTFS version, but I guess that problem may have existed previously as well.
- setquk 8y agoMFT is an internal structure. They could fix it TBH but the issue is that this would require an NTFS filesystem revision and for those of us who suffered through NT4's broken ass filesystems might start complaining :)