Plethora of New User Space Filesystems For Mac OS X 225
DaringDan writes "As part of the recent MacFUSE 2.0 release Amit Singh has added support for an insane number of filesystems on the Mac. This video from Google and this blog post pretty much explain everything in detail but to sum-up Singh has written a new filesystem called AncientFS which lets you mount a ton of UNIX file formats starting from the very first version of UNIX. Even more interesting is that they have also taken Linux kernel implementations of filesystems like ufs, sysv-fs, minix-fs and made them work in user-space on the Mac, which means its now possible to read disks from OSes like FreeBSD, Solaris and NeXT on OS X. ext2/ext3 don't seem to be on the list but apparently the source for everything is provided, so hopefully some enterprising soul can apply the same techniques to ext2. One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"
Looking forward to this! (Score:4, Interesting)
I still have the old Intel Rhapsody DR2 disks lying around, and would love to see if this can read the filesystem. It's kind of fun playing around it what was NeXT with a MacOS interface, and at times I almost would rather have it than what OS X became, if only to eliminate the stupid gimmicks.
Sounds great. (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially if I ever need to recover one of my linux box's drives from a Mac.
But really, all I want for christmas is NTFS write support.
Re:News? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm curious why this was modded troll, I think the above poster has a valid point - why did slashdot miss out on a pretty important article that could potentially affect all Mac users, while they posted an article that's not really going to apply to more than 1% or 2% of Mac users?
Hm. (Score:1, Interesting)
A plethora of new user space filesystems for OS X and they didn't include the most common Linux filesystems? That seems odd.
FUSE vs. FST (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's GS/OS had FSTs (File System Translators) that allowed that operating system to access HFS, ProDOS, DOS 3.3, and FAT volumes. How does FUSE compare in function to GS/OS's FSTs? You know, apart from working with non-obsolete hardware.
Re:Sounds great. (Score:3, Interesting)
So why can't you use the native NTFS read-only driver for reads and the NTFS-3G driver for writes?
Reiser 4 (Score:3, Interesting)
Wasn't this sort of thing the idea behind the original "plug-in" mechanism planned for Reiser 4? I remember being intrigued by the idea of writing file-system customizations in perl, and I was looking forward to playing around with it to see what could be done with it.
Unfortunately, it appears that the kernel devs don't want to hear about any functionality that doesn't fit in the box of their VFS layer.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Naturally you can always comment "Why use a Mac in the first place when you could have a linux desktop?" but I would reply that I don't have a choice, the CEO only buys Macs for workstations. So I have to use what I've got. This would make my life easier.
And Macs don't run linux?
Real programmers do bigger on smaller (Score:4, Interesting)
> "One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac
> through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"
Hmpfh... Circa 1978-79, Forrest Howard and I wrote a PDP-10 simulator that ran on a PDP-11/70 (a 36 bit machine on a 16 bit machine for those not educated in DEC hardware). It was used to recompile the DEC Fortran compiler which was written in Bliss-11. And the Bliss-11 compiler could only be run on a PDP-10. Lacking a PDP-10 (expensive pseudo-mainframe computers in those days) we simply wrote a simulator. It didn't run fast, as I recall the DEC Fortran compiler recompile took several weeks, but it did run.
Reproducing a PDP-11 sumulator on modern hardware would be relatively trivial, though it would have been much easier on older Macs because it could be argued that the 680X0 architecture was a knockoff of the PDP-11 architecture. Though one could suppose that current era (non-680X0 or non-PowerPC) machines are fast enough that it is a noop. I think the PDP-11 had a 300 ns cycle time and current machines are ~10x faster. Any current machines could easily simulate a '70s era minicomputer (or even most mainframes).