Practical File System Design with the Be File System
by Dominic Giampaolo · first published 1999
8mentions
6recommended by
8HN commenters
2015–2024first – last mentioned
75% recommend13% neutral13% critical
Why HN recommends it
Well-written, practical guide to file system design tradeoffs, valued by students and engineers new to the subject; freely available as a PDF and often cited as a strong introduction.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Dominic Giampaolo wrote "Practical File System Design with the Be File System" which he has made freely available at: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf I found it to be well written and interesting when I was a university student first going deep on the…
on “Inferno, Part 3: Let's Make a Filesystem” ↗For a great introduction to file systems, I highly recommend Practical File System Design with the Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo, creator of the Be File System who ended up moving to Apple and designed Spotlight, the file indexing and search system that was introduced in Mac OS X Tiger. It's very well written…
on “Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?” ↗These are both somewhat dated but still very worth while and relevant reads, you can find them cheap on Amazon: "UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation 1st Edition" by by Steve D. Pate "Practical File System Design with the Be File System" by Dominic Giampaolo
on “Ask HN: Recommended guides for learning filesystems?” ↗Not entirely related, but recently I began re-reading Practical File System Design with the Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo. Not exactly an up-to-date text, but a good guide to the tradeoffs involved in designing a file system. * https://web.archive.org/web/20170213221835/http://www.nobius...
on “50 years in filesystems: 1984 BSD FFS” ↗…the future of storing data. This leads me to ask (since I haven't experimented with file system design since 2006?) where are there file system design resources in 2024? (I am aware of the classic "Practical File System Design with the Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo) Edit: I also feel like some of my thoughts have been coming after the recent update from Hans Reiser.)
on “Ask HN: File System Design in 2024?” ↗Also interesting: Practical File System Design with the Be File System http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective” ↗BeOS used mime types. Practical File System Design with the Be File System - http://www.nobius.org/dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
on “The Perils of File Typing” ↗…that metadata can be freestanding, and can exist even if the main file is missing. Relevant section to read: https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio... I did read the entire book "Practical File System Design with the Be File System", but didn't find it helpful for what I was working on. I can skip the low-level bits because I'll probably build on top of a NoSQL database or something.
on “Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)” ↗