On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 12:19 PM, <casper....@sun.com> wrote: > > >> >>As ZFS does not have the limits of FAT/FAT32 and is also open source, could >>it be proposed to the makers of digitial devices like camera, usb memory >>manufacturers, router manufacturers, etc as a way of eliminating the FAT >>licensing yoke. This of course would require drivers to be available for >>Windows >>to allow read/write access and also speed up the time it makes the disk >>available for use. > > There are many reasons why this doesn't fly: > > - First of all you will need to build away to easily, automatically > import and export removable ZFS pools > > - Installed base (windows, USB, cameras) > > - "pcfs" uses about 1/10 of the code needed for support zfs and > it doesn't need as much memory as zfs does. > > - Microsoft owns pcfs, so there's no point for them to change > windows > > - Porting a filesystem is a lot more difficult. > > > Casper
I would agree with Casper: For external USB/eSATA/FireWire hdd's it might make sense (and we Solaris users can simply use ZFS there, let the manufacturers pre-format them with what they want), but for little cameras or embedded use it is just too much overhead (in every aspect) I would assume. Another point is, that pcfs can be read everywhere, by everything, with a small footprint. It will be hard to replace it with another technology, even if completely superior to it. Other communities were already discussiong about ZFS vs. NTFS5 or FAT32: http://www.google.com/search?q=zfs+%22replace+fat%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a But never forget the impact which Microsoft's market dominance has onto what the influental big vendors are going to do, and what not. And with which "tricks" (in fact dirty and 100% criminal actions) they managed to establish MS-DOS 5.00 and then Windows3.x and 4.x as leading PC operating operating environments: ----->>> (really interesting parts contained) http://www.maxframe.com/DR/Info/fullstory/tech.html . I myself managed to get the Win9x (95/98/SE/ME) GUI running on top of DR-DOS and MS-DOS 6.22 as well as PC DOS 5.x, this was possible via the SoftICE low-level debugger and a small TSR which I wrote from 2004 to 2005. I witnessed their dirty tricks like few others, in x86 asm, for example in the VKD.VXD driver which's src they published as part of the Win9x DDK. I doubt ZFS will replace FAT32 in consumer devices, at least until the FAT's maximum filesystem size restrictions become more of a problem (2 TB or 8 TB [with 32KB clusters]) according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table. External drives are approaching this border already (little photo cameras are far away). But this doesn't mean there are substantial hopes for ZFS. In January I bought external drives (1TB, Seagate SATA in Maxdata USB2 enclosure), and they came preformatted with NTFS, not FAT32. Also take into account the new "exFAT". ZFS will not replace FAT, unless Microsoft sees whatever hypothetical benefit in it, makes - and pushes through - such a decision by themselves. Having a superior technology doesn't imply you can compete with Microsoft. Otherwise nobody would nowadays talk about something like "FAT" or "WINDOWS", except in cases when she/he needs some fresh air after having returned from jogging ;-) %martin _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
