(BFS, occasionally misnamed as BeFS) is the native
File System for the
BeOS Operating System .
BFS was developed by
Dominic Giampaolo and
Cyril Meurillon in
1996 over a ten month period to provide
BeOS with a modern
64-bit capable
Journaling File System . It is
Case Sensitive and capable of being used on
Floppy ,
Hard Disk s and read-only media such as
CD-ROM s, although its use on small removable media is not advised, as the file system headers consume from 600KB to 2MB, rendering floppy disks virtually useless.
Like its predecessor, OFS (written by
Benoit Schillings , Old Be File System, was also called BFS when current), it includes support for extended file attributes (
Metadata ) with indexing and querying characteristics to provide functionality similar to that of a
Relational Database . Similar facilities are scheduled for future versions of
Microsoft Windows under the name
WinFS .
Its design process,
API , and internal workings are, for the most part, documented in the book ''Practical File System Design with the Be File System''. Although the book is now out of print it is freely available as a
PDF file
{Link without Title} .
Because of the size of some on-disk structures as described in Benoit's book the filesystem cannot actually be used for volumes as large as its "64-bit" designation suggests, instead the practical size limit is approximately 2 exabytes. Similarly the extent based file allocation reduces the maximum practical file size to approximately 260 gigabytes at best and as little as a few blocks in a pathological worst case depending on the degree of
Fragmentation .
BFS has been reimplemented as OpenBFS as a part of the
Haiku Open Source operating system.
SkyFS , a filesystem used in
SkyOS , is a
Fork of OpenBFS.
