When and why to deprecate filesystems [LWN.net]

When and why to deprecate filesystems

Posted Mar 8, 2022 16:38 UTC (Tue) by stevie-oh (subscriber, #130795)
In reply to: When and why to deprecate filesystems by NYKevin
Parent article: When and why to deprecate filesystems

> NTFS has "alternate data streams," which I have never heard of existing under any other filesystem

Mac OS' HFS had them first, there they are called "resource forks".

In fact, the entire reason NTFS has Alternate Data Streams is that Microsoft wanted to make it possible to use a Windows server as a file server for a group of Macs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_stream_(ADS)

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When and why to deprecate filesystems

Posted Mar 9, 2022 7:44 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

Judging by that Wikipedia article, alternate data streams are now used for similar purposes as Linux uses extended attributes. So not an entirely useless feature.
Copying from NTFS to a modern Linux file system could use an extended attribute to simulate a stream, unless it contains too much data.

When and why to deprecate filesystems

Posted Mar 10, 2022 2:26 UTC (Thu) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

yes, however really you might want some translation (in particular for mark-of-the-web).

NTFS supports actual extended attributes too, so you have some risk of collision if you try and merge ADS and ntfs xattr.

When and why to deprecate filesystems

Posted Mar 18, 2022 19:55 UTC (Fri) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link] (1 responses)

ADS and xattrs aren't entirely equivalent. One important aspect of ADS is that the stream cannot be accessed without knowing the name, whereas you can list all existing xattrs for a file without knowing them.

When and why to deprecate filesystems

Posted Mar 19, 2022 23:34 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

I find that very hard to believe, given that (a) you couldn't backup your system without that function and (b) you get pointers to numerous utilities as well as the relevant Windows kernel functions when you do a simple web search for "enumerate alternate data streams".