Also a longer critique by John Siracusa here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/#hfs-p...
I wonder how this ties in with the whole Apple philosophy of "Design is how it works."
Clearly the innards look nothing like the facade.
I wonder how this ties in with the whole Apple philosophy of "Design is how it works."
Clearly the innards look nothing like the facade.
Holy heck! How does that work in practice? Do operations get queued and then a single kernel process who can take the lock do the atomic updates?
I have to imagine that is going to cause a bottleneck however, as all non-read operations need to update the metadata (e.g. timestamp, maybe size if it is stored).
That all being said I haven't noticed OS X being particularly slower to do things than e.g. Windows. So if that is the case they're hiding it well.
OS X already has some pretty high-level file and metadata APIs not found on other systems, so maybe Apple's future plans don't look like a traditional Unix file system at all. They've already demonstrated they know how to make a very weird, non-Unix filesystem look like one. ;)