Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Gefs: A good enough filesystem for Plan 9 (orib.dev)
6 points by fanf2 on April 29, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


This sort of thing fascinates me - more or less ordinary folks doing stuff that used to earn someone a PhD. Goes to show you that having some critical mass of participants leads to good things. The design is interesting and the writer seems to be doing a great job!

But it's also kind a dead end. Essentially nobody will use this. The two most important file systems are FAT (dating from a floppy disk file system in 1977) and NTFS, clearly a direct descent of DEC's ODS-2 which has roots in TOPS-20 and RSTS operating systems of the early 1970s.

I mean, every single USB thumb drive has a FAT system on it. Booting an ARM CPU requires a FAT filesystem. Windows, the standard corporate operating system, uses NTFS. Gefs will get installed on maybe 1000 systems if it's lucky.


With the billions of phones out there (neither on FAT nor NTFS), I think you underestimate the importance of other filesystems.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: