The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective

HD, so like... a high-definition floppy?

It's the day after Independence Day in the US, and much of our staff is just returning to their preferred work machines. If this was 1997 instead of 2018, that would mean booting up BeOS for some. The future-of-operating-systems-that-never-was arrived just over 20 years ago, so in light of the holiday, we're resurfacing this geek's guide. The piece originally ran on June 2, 2010; it appears unchanged below.

The Be operating system file system, known simply as BFS, is the file system for the Haiku, BeOS, and SkyOS operating systems. When it was created in the late '90s as part of the ill-fated BeOS project, BFS's ahead-of-its-time feature set immediately struck the fancy OS geeks. That feature set includes:

• A 64-bit address space
• Use of journaling
• Highly multithreaded reading
• Support of database-like extended file attributes
• Optimization for streaming file access

A dozen years later, the legendary BFS still merits exploration-so we're diving in today, starting with some filesystem basics and moving on to a discussion of the above features. We also chatted with two people intimately familiar with the OS: the person who developed BFS for Be and the developer behind the open-source version of BFS.

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