Re: reiser4 for windows

[Jiri Klouda <jk@zg.cz>]

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> Also, is it a given that reiser4 for windows would work without help
> from MS?  I've just never seen a third-party filesystem driver for
> windows.  You'd think that at least one other filesystem, one of the
> Linux/BSD/etc ones, would have done this, if it was feasable.

You might be onto something here. I am pretty sure my company would
pay quite a lot for a working, fast and elegant implementation of 
symbolic links on windows. Either as a new filesystem or as an addition 
onto ntfs. We currently use one such addition and not very usable and
uses a catalog of symlinks that can easily get corrupted.

Having reiser4 on Windows or even ext2, would be a huge thing.

> All this leaves me with the distinct impression that it'd be cheaper to
> buy some gigabit ethernet (or fibre) and a Linux CIFS/Samba fileserver
> using reiser4.  Steam and others refuse to install on network drives,
> Windows probably will not boot off a network drive, but I imagine that
> fixing these would be easier than porting a filesystem.

Unfortunatelly even with very fast ethernet connections and network
appliance with CIFS access, we still don't get the performance of a
local filesystem. Plus, you don't want to really give write access 
over network, that slows down anything when you get into hundreds of
clients. And we really cannot pay for so many network applicances to
make this scalable proposition.

I wish we could just drop Windows as a platform, but as long as there
are customers, there will be need to support them as well... :(

-Jiri

-- 
Jiri Klouda <jk@zg.cz>
http://www.zg.cz/~jk

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