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I was thinking about this yesterday; other than POSIX why do operating systems choose a filesystem heirarchy as the thing that they provide as a datastore? Why

I was thinking about this yesterday; other than POSIX why do operating systems choose a filesystem heirarchy as the thing that they provide as a datastore? Why not a structured document store, a blob store, a key value store, or some mixture of all of this? I'm very bitter that computing went into turtle stacking mode and took its 50 years of baggage with it.

WantonQuantum 3y ago
Microsoft tried this with Windows Future Storage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS OS/400 is quite different too: https://www.quora.com/On-the-AS-400-how-are-objects-stored-on-a-disk-compared-to-a-traditional-filesystem-like-FAT32-or-ext4-Whats-the-underlying-filesystem-like https://www.quora.com/On-the-AS-400-how-are-objects-stored-o... The BeOS filesystem has many DB like features: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Two separate things: - I don't think that the suggestion was to remove the filesystem outright, just that if you run everything over NFS or 9P then you don't need drivers for ext/xfs/fat/... - To the broader "why do we even use filesystems" - because those other options are less powerful while offering marginal benefit. Also because backwards-compatibility and interoperability with other systems is useful.
lproven 3y ago
There have been several. IBM i is one, formerly known as OS/400. The Pick OS is another. Here's a modern one, DBOS: https://dbos-project.github.io/ https://dbos-project.github.io/