Hi Ethan, On Fri, 4 Sept 2026 at 09:30, Ethan Nelson-Moore <[email protected]> wrote: > > BFS (not to be confused with BeFS, the BeOS filesystem) is the > filesystem UnixWare uses for its boot partition. It has extremely > limited functionality, only supporting contiguous files and no > subdirectories. Even though the bfs driver is very small and is > unlikely to cause future maintenance problems, given that the only type > of data stored on such a partition is likely to be kernels and > bootloader settings, there is very little reason anyone would want to > access it from Linux. Other old Unix filesystems (efs, freevxfs) have > been removed recently, and bfs is highly unlikely to have any users, so > remove it as well. Retain the UAPI header to be safe. >
You are right that probably no one would want to use BFS for storing the actual data today. But some things have didactical value, rather than mere pragmatic usage. It is the didactic value of MINIX (and its limitations wrt making use of the wonderful capabilities of i386) that has originally triggered the creation of Linux. But back to BFS: it is actually used in Steve Pate's book "Linux Filesystems" (2024, unfinished yet), which is a sequel to his excellent classic "UNIX Filesystems" (2003), as an illustration of a particularly simple filesystem implementation. I remember when Linus accepted my patch with BFS on 28 October 1999 into 2.3.25 his comment was: "this appears to be a particularly simple one". Kind regards, Tigran
