NTFS provides on-disk indexes, that's where Windows Search stores its data... and how directories work in NTFS. Similar features can be handled in ZFS (the bigg

NTFS provides on-disk indexes, that's where Windows Search stores its data... and how directories work in NTFS. Similar features can be handled in ZFS (the biggest issue is that IIRC its large K/V structure is AVL Tree, so you'd probably need to add a new object at ZPL layer). What is the big difference is that BeFS exposed the extended attributes easily in the file manager and APIs - compare it with other systems where the APIs were little known or not used - POSIX extended attributes which are very limited (4k), Solaris extended attributes (which let you open a file as a directory) but are Solaris only, WinNT which had the issue of WinNT being a niche among windows systems, etc. etc. BeOS in comparison required at least considerable porting work, at worst writing from scratch, and that meant the new features were much more visible.