Be File System

The Be File System (BFS, BeFS) is the native file system for the BeOS operating system.

BFS was developed by Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon in 1996 over a ten month period to provide BeOS with a modern 64-bit capable journaling file system. It is case sensitive and capable of being used on floppy, hard disks and read-only media such as CD-ROMs, although its use on small removable media is not advised, as the file system headers consume from 600KB to 2MB, rendering floppy disks virtually useless.

Like its predecessor, OFS (Old Be File System, was also called BFS when current), it includes support for extended file attributes (metadata) with indexing and querying characteristics to provide functionality similar to that of a relational database. Similar facilities are scheduled for future versions of Microsoft Windows under the name WinFS.

Its design process, API, and internal workings are, for the most part, documented in the book Practical File System Design with the Be File System. Although the book is now out of print it is freely available as a PDF file [1].

BeFS has been reimplemented as OpenBFS as a part of their open source operating system, Haiku. SkyFS, a filesystem used in SkyOS, is a fork of OpenBFS.

References

• Giampaolo, Dominic (1999). Practical File System Design with the Be File System. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 1558604979.

See also

• Comparison of file systems

External links

• OpenBFS implementation
• BeFS driver for Linux