I most recently encountered this fact from the game, Stray! You know, the recent game with the cat and all the robots. Apparently their city design was heavily inspired by the Kowloon Walled City.
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn’t updated the file system in so long. They were going to with Longhorn/VIsta but that failed and it seems like they’ve been gunshy ever since.
You don’t sound like you weren’t around the Windows Vista/Longhorn development days when they promised a successor to NTFS and then over the course of the next couple of years, would bail on that (and nearly every other promise made).
And FWIW, they are developing ReFS, which looks like it will finally supplant NTFS, but given MS’ business model, don’t expect NTFS to ever really disappear.
Yeah, I definitely was. I think that gave them PTSD or something because they haven’t even tried to make moderate changes to NTFS since. And besides ReFS which I hadn’t heard about until this thread, they haven’t even done something as minor as give you an option to use different file systems like ext4.
NTFS has evolved over the years, but the base structure is mostly unchanged. Things have changed, but not the name. I think they’ve been using NTFS v3 for a while now…
Yeah, that’s what I mean. There have been small changes, but nothing major and if the other poster was right, even minor changes haven’t been made since 2004.
Meanwhile Apple has come out with APFS and *nix variants have multiple file systems, each more modern than NTFS.
It is weird to me. Here’s hoping reFS or some other file system comes out.
ReFS is out. But only specific revisions of Windows, notably Windows server, can use it for specific use cases.
I tried setting up ReFS on a disk for a cluster of hyper-v systems… I couldn’t because they were using a cluster shared DAS, and in that version of Windows server or ReFS there was no support for cluster access to the FS, it should have otherwise worked, it just seems a bit incomplete at the moment. If I had been using it for cifs access for a single server, then yeah, it probably would have been fine, it was just the clustered direct access that wasn’t yet supported.
Windows desktop is unlikely to get ReFS support until the fs is more mature, and it’s likely that will be limited to non-os disks for a while.
It’s pretty far along right now, it’s just that MS isn’t going to pop open any Champaign until the fs can hold its own as a direct replacement and upgrade from NTFS, with all the capabilities and features required (and more).
I’ll note that the vast majority of systems running some kind of *nix are generally using either ext2 or ext3. Where ext3 is essentially just ext2 with journaling (which is something NTFS has, AFAIK), and ext2 is just as old as NTFS.
We can argue and complain all we want, but these are tried and true, battle tested file systems that do the job adequately for the demands of systems, both in the past, and now. They do one fairly simple thing… Organizing data on disk into files and directories, and enabling that data to be written, updated, read from, and otherwise retrieved when needed.
I know in IT we don’t go by the saying “if it’s not broken don’t fix it”, since all of us have horror stories of when you don’t fix something that’s not broken and something very bad happens… But I would say that systems like ext2/3 and NTFS have achieved the coveted goal of RFC 1925, rule 12: In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
There’s no fat in these file systems. Everything in them generally exists for good reason, the fs is stable and does the required job.
Does that mean we should pack it up, we’ll never need another fs again? Absolutely not. We will hit the hard upper limits of what these file systems can do, eventually; probably fairly soon, but that doesn’t mean that either is bad simply because they are old.
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn’t updated the file system in so long.
Honest question: why? NTFS isn’t great, it isn’t terrible, it’s functional. I don’t really spend any time thinking about my filesystem. I like having symbolic links on my Linux boxes, but aside from that I just want it to work, and NTFS does.
Honest answer: it’s fragile. There are many cases of media durability being an issue and there will be going into the future. Adding a layer of ecc in the fs goes a long way.
WinFS wasn’t a replacement of NTFS as much as it was a supplement. Documents could be broken apart into atomic pieces, like an embedded image and that would be indexed on its own. Those pieces were kept in something more like a SQL database, more like using binary blobs in SharePoint Portal, but that database still was written to the disk on an NTFS partition as I recall. WinFS was responsible for bringing those pieces back together to represent a compete document if you were transferring it to a non-WinFS filesystem or transferring to a different system altogether. It wasn’t a new filesystem as much as it was a database with a filesystem driver.
Curiously, in cyberpunk media this sort of mega-slum is often portrayed as an excess of capitalist urbanization, whereas in historical reality it was an exclave of “communist” China inserted into “capitalist” British Hong Kong, wherein the “capitalist” authorities had no jurisdiction.
(Edited: Sounds more like the point was that it was effectively nobody’s jurisdiction.)
What the fuck are you talking about? In actual reality it was a product of capitalism. Specifically British imperialist capitalism in China. It took until the mid 80’s (40 years after the Communists came to power) for the British to allow China to have control over the area and it was turned in to a park less than a decade later, clearly indicating that the Communists were in no way interested in continuing the existence of the dystopian walled city.
With no government enforcement from the Chinese or the British aside from a few raids by the Hong Kong Police, the walled city became a haven for crime and drugs. It was only during a 1959 trial for a murder that occurred within the walled city that the Hong Kong government was ruled to have jurisdiction there.
The KMT repeatedly sent requests to reclaim the entire region but Imperial Britain pretty much refused (they proposed a ton of alternative solutions) and didn't govern it either. So yes, it's Imperial Britain's fault. Since the day Britain agreed to transfer the territory to the CCP there was a declared intent to demolish the place.
It’s more accurate to say that the British prevented either themselves (through inaction) or China (by treaty/law) from having any practical control. If you’d bother to read the wiki article OP linked you’d know. China should have had jurisdication, but Britain techincally had (imperialist) jurisdication. The result was a no-man’s land until Britain finally gave up.
Can you walk me through how you arrived at the idea that Kowloon was a product of communism, and explain when and why the Chinese decided to insert it into Hong Kong? Sorry if I'm a bit slow, but what you wrote runs counter to everything I thought I knew about the topic.
In a Digimon game on the switch there’s a level called Kowloon. It is represented as what is described here and I’m grateful to have learned the real world connection
You talking about Cyber Sleuth? It’s available on PC, PS4, Vita (which I think is where it first launched), along with the switch you mentioned.
Please be aware that plenty of games on the switch are actually multiplatform. We don’t want people not checking out a game because they think it’s only on the switch.
We don’t want people not checking out a game because they think it’s only on the switch.
We? Is there some secret Game Reccomendation Governing Body in charge of how to recommend something properly?
If someone wants to play a game, it’s on them to research the game and how they can play it on their own consoles. It’s unfair to put the responsibility on the recommender for knowing every single possible platform a game could be played on.
I appreciate that you commented and provided extra information for other potential players. But IMO, your tone implies that OP provided this recommendation incorrectly, which I don’t think is justified.
According to the second video I linked, a resident of Kowloon spent the better part of six years mapping out the city. Here’s the timestamp: youtu.be/PcSBOUpgngM?t=794
Edit: Just to clarify, I run ALOT of operating systems in my lab; RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu (several LTS flavors), TruNAS, Unraid, RancherOS, ESXi, Windows 2003 thru 2022, Windows 10, Windows 11.
My latest headless Steam box with Windows 11 based on a AMD 5600g basically reboots about as fast as I can retype my password in RDP.
Probably a gaming PC (as he mentioned Steam) without a display connected to it that’s used for game streaming using Parsec or other software like Sunshine. By the way, if you want to try that setup yourself make sure you get a dummy plug (HDMI or DisplayPort) for the GPU as Windows doesn’t really allow video capture if no display is detected.
Comment by someone who hasn’t used Windows in an age. When was the last time you rebooted because you had installed new software? When was the last time you ran random code from a forum post to make software work? Because this windows user doesn’t remember ever doing that.
*nix systems are not immune to needing reboots after updates. I work as an escalation engineer for an IT support firm and our support teams that do *nix updates without reboots have DEFINATELY been the cause of some hard to find issues. We’ll often review environment changes first thing during an engagement only to fix the issue to find that it was from some update change 3 months ago where the team never rebooted to validate the new config was good. Not gonna argue that in general its more stable and usually requires less reboots, but its certainly not the answer to every Windows pitfall.
The only time you truly need to reboot is when you update your kernel.
The solution to this problem is live-patching. Not really a game changer with consumer electronics because they don’t have to use ECC, but with servers that can take upwards of 10 minutes to reboot, it is a game changer.
Damn yeah I didn’t think of that either. Alright, scratch what I said. The point still stands that you very rarely need to update outside of scenarios containing very critical processes such as these, those of which depend on what work you do with it.
It’s been a long slow night and morning and I was half awake when I said that. Hell I’m still half awake now, just disregard anything I’ve said.
Many Linux package managers themselves tell you you should reboot your system after updates, especially if the update has touched system packages. You can definitely run into problems that will leave you scratching your head if you don’t.
Yesterday, on one of my family members computer the Laptop speakers stopped working, after an hour of clicking through legacy Ui trying to fix it(Lenovo Yoga 730 if someone could help me) I gave up, plugged my Linux boot usb in to test if there is a driver issue or so. Miss click in the boot menu and had to wait half an hour for a random Windows update(I did not start it because I used the physical button to turn it off, with Windows 11 turning off the computer via software requires so much mouse movement).
Omg. This hits home. I think Linux has prompted / asked me to reboot one time since I installed it 2 months ago. Windows wants you to reboot everytime you change anything. I didn’t realize how insanely often it asks until I had something to compare it to.
I got a friend trying Linux for the first time and they asked for some help picking software to install, like which office suite or photo app etc… They just instinctively rebooted after everything they did like it was a pavlovian response, lol.
This will vary by distro. Arch for example expects (but doesn’t ask) you to reboot quite often since their packages are “bleeding edge” and update the kernel often.
I love this place. I remember the first time ever learning about it, in some book I had as a child. Such an interesting history and fascinating that so many people lived in such cramped density.
I can't believe Microsoft is still using this piece of crap filesystem. If they had a CoW filesystem they could even paper over the mess that is Windows Update without having to actually fix it, they could save petabytes of storage over the world and significantly improve reliability all in one go. Let's not even mention how NTFS is amazingly slow on hard drives, manages to fragment to hell and back without doing anything, requires offline repairs like it was FAT32 and its compression barely does anything while massively slowing down the computer.
Yet here I am envying btrfs, APFS, ZFS and even fucking XFS for their reflinks and CoW.
In fact, not even WSL uses a modern FS, I think Microsoft is allergic to modern FSs.
None of these problems are really dealbreakers for a consumer-oriented file system in 2023. Not even ext4 supports CoW. Now that everyone boots off an SSD, things like file fragmentation no longer matter, and most of NTFS' continued slowness has more to do with Windows itself than the actual file system.
ReFS is Microsoft's new file system meant for more advanced use cases. It supports many but not all of these advanced features. Starting with Windows 11, you can actually boot off a ReFS drive, though I'm not sure that is a recommended configuration.
I may as well make myself unpopular with some context…
Some here have compared NTFS with ZFS, which is unfair as ZFS is over 12 years younger. In 1993 machines had an average of less than 4Mb of RAM, and the average disk size was probably somewhere in the 80-100Mb range. NTFS required more RAM - if you wanted to run it I think you had to have 12Mb of RAM minimum, maybe even 16Mb. If you didn’t have that you had to install your Windows NT 3.1 copy with FAT…
A better comparison filesystem would be XFS, which was developed at around the same time and saw its first release in 1994.
XFS has had a lot more development of late than NTFS has, and it could be argued that because of that it now has the edge. But both are venerable survivors of that era. Both are reliable, robust, feature-rich and widely deployed.
A lot of problems that people have with NTFS are to do with the way Windows handles disk access rather than the filesystem itself. A filesystem is more than just an on-disk layout and a bit of code to read or write from it, it also has to interact with OS disk buffering systems, security systems, caching mechanisms, and possibly even things like file locking and notification mechanisms.
Windows has a concept of the “installable file system” - these days it’s primarily a way to load filter drivers that can inspect all I/O operations. It’s how Windows security programs like antivirus work, but also how Windows prevents writes to its own folders by ordinary users. As you can guess, that slows things down. On the boot/OS drive of a Windows machine there are a lot of filter drivers. Android developers know this from how long some build operations take, and have often cursed at NTFS for it. Yet if you move the project onto a non-OS NTFS drive, suddenly it’s much faster - because that drive lacks many of those filter drivers, as there is no OS to protect on that drive.
The point here being that NTFS often gets slammed for issues which aren’t its fault, and it has no control over.
NTFS is probably in the top ten most-installed filesystems ever. And high on that top ten. (I wonder what that top ten would look like? I think that embedded use of ext2 probably places it near the top, but then you have wildcards like the Minix file system… anyway, back on track!)
Filesystems are one of those things that everyone takes for granted, yet are incredibly important. NTFS may not be native to Linux, and may come from somewhere that many see as “the enemy”, but I think 30 years of tireless work deserves some recognition.
What’s the benefit to the average end user to modernizing NTFS?
Sure, I love having btrfs on my NAS for all the features it brings, but I’m not a normal person. What significant changes that would affect your average user does NTFS require to modernize it?
I just see it as an “if it’s not broken” type thing. I can’t say I’ve ever given the slightest care about what filesystem my computer was running until I got into NAS/backups, which itself was a good 10 years after I got into building PCs. The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter when I’m reinstalling every few years and have backups elsewhere.
At the very least, better filesystem level compression support. A somewhat common usecase might be people who use emulators. Both Wii U and PS3 are consoles where major emulators just use a folder on your filesystem. I know a lot of emulator users who are non-technical to the point that they don’t have “show hidden files and folders” enabled.
Also your average person wouldn’t necessarily need checksums, but having them built into the filesystem would lead to overall more reliability.
Near instantaneous snapshots and rollback (would help with system restore etc)
Compression that uses a modern algorithm
Checking for silent corruption, so users know if their files are no longer correct
I’d add better built in multi-device support and recovery (think RAID and drive pooling) but that might be beyond the “average” user (which is always a vague term and I feel there are many types of users within that average). E.g. users that mod their games can benefit from snapshots and/or reflink copies allowing to make backups of their game dirs without taking up any additional space beyond the changes that the mods add.
I agree all those are nice things to have, and things I’d want to see in an update. Now how can you sell those features to management? How do these improve the experience for the everyday end user?
I’d say the snapshots feature could be a major selling point. Windows needs a good backup/restore solution.
It just seems like potentially a ton of work to satisfy the needs of “people who think about filesystems”, which is an extremely small subset of users. I can see how it might be hard to get the manpower and resources needed to rework the Windows default filesystem.
I really have no clue how much work it takes though, so it’s just speculation on my end. I’m just curious; on one hand, I do see where NTFS is way behind, but on the other… who cares? I’ve somehow made it past 20 years of building WIndows PCs without really caring what filesystem I’ve used, from 95 all the way to 11.
I’m not sure you need to sell it to actual users. A lot of benefits of an advanced filesystem could be done by the OS itself, almost transparently. All of the features I mentioned could be managed by Windows, with only minimal changes to the UI. Even reflink copies could just be a control panel option then used by default in Explorer (equivalent of cp --reflink=auto in Linux). And from the OS side, deduplication would help a lot on Windows given all of the DLL bundling, and weird shit they have to do to maintain legacy compatibility, and that’s no small thing given how space inefficient modern Windows installs have become.
It would be some work to upgrade it (maybe a lot given how ancient and likely full of cruft that Windows is full of with legacy compatibility) but it would eventually make the system more reliable and more space efficient.
But yeah, there are challenges. I’m mainly speaking in terms of btrfs which would take some time to port to Windows (although there is a 3rd party driver they’d want to handle it themselves I suspect) but they’ll probably want to use their own ReFS and I’ve not really investigated it seriously so I can’t say how ready that is for prime time. But given that it’s being included as an option in some enterprise/server editions of Windows maybe it will be soon in consumer editions soon anyway (as much as I’d prefer something more open and widely supported, at least it’s a step forward on Windows).
This might sound ignorant but that’s cause I am. Why doesn’t windows just use ext4, btrfs, XFS, or something open source. They wouldn’t have to worry about developing it so it’d be a load off their chest and they could get really good features that even NTFS doesn’t have. Well maybe not with ext4 but with btrfs
Microsoft really really hated open source some time ago. Now they seem to have embraced it, however some still think that might be an attempt to EEE.
Still, I suppose Microsoft doesn’t think replacing the Windows default filesystem is a sound investment at this point even if the political resistance to such a change is, supposedly, gone.
XFS, the default filesystem in Red Hat, is older than NTFS. Released 1994.
I’ll say this, the previous admin of one of the Linux servers I support set up RAID-0 striping for the main data slice (must have been dropped on their head as a child or something). Two drives, and one of the drives developed bad sectors, but I was still able to recover 95% of the data before it shit the bed completely. So, XFS is apparently quite resilient, or I got lucky.
en.wikipedia.org
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