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  Full Name Be File System
  Developer Be Inc
  Introduction Os BeOS Advanced Access Preview Release1
  Introduction Date May 10, 1997
  Partition Id Be_BFS ( Apple Partition Map ) <br> 0xEB ( MBR )
  Directory Struct B+ Tree
  File Struct Inode s
  Bad Blocks Struct Inodes
  Max Filename Size 255 characters
  Max Files No Unlimited
  Max Volume Size ~2 EB
  Max File Size ~260 GB
  Filename Character Set All UTF-8 but "/"
  Dates Recorded Access, Creation, Modified
  Date Range Unknown
  Date Resolution Unknown
  Forks Streams Yes
  Attributes POSIX ACLs: Read, Write, Execute
  File System Permissions Yes, POSIX (RWX per owner, group and all)
  Compression No
  Encryption No


The Be File System ('''BFS''', occasionally misnamed as BeFS) is the native File System for the BeOS Operating System .

BFS was developed by Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon over a ten month period, starting in September 1996 2, to provide BeOS with a modern 64-bit capable Journaling File System 3. 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 current4), it includes support for extended file attributes ( Metadata ) with indexing and querying characteristics to provide functionality similar to that of a Relational Database .

Whilst intended as a 64-bit capable file system the size of some on-disk structures mean that 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 .

Its design process, Application Programming Interface , and internal workings are, for the most part, documented in the book ''Practical File System Design with the Be File System''.


IMPLEMENTATIONS


In early 1999, Makoto Kato developed a Be File System driver for Linux , however the driver never reached a complete stable state, so in 2001 Will Dyson developed his own version of the Linux BFS driver5.

As part of the OpenBeOS attempt to recreate the BeOS operating system, in 2002 Axel Dörfler and a few other developers created and released a reimplemented BFS called OpenBFS6. In January 2004, Robert Szeleney announced that he had developed a fork of this OpenBFS file system for use in his SkyOS operating system7.


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SEE ALSO