Update on Windows driver for BeFS

Recently I stated that I would be willing to work on a Windows filesystem driver for BeFS but it’s turned out to be harder than I anticipated.

The main problem is that I lack the knowledge of how BeFS works, and there is no official documentation outside of a book that is quite unclear and possibly incorrect.

I don’t want to spend days trying to reverse engineer the system and reading driver code from Haiku (which I’ve already tried to do), so if anyone familiar with how the system works would document it properly it would be a huge help for me, and probably others who wish to get involved with either Haiku or BeFS.

As an additional note, documentation doesn’t need to be super fancy of scientific like it is for complex specifications, something in the style of the metroid prime wiki would work just fine (example)

2 Likes

We tend to spend our time developing the system rather than write such formal documentation. The source code is well-organized and generally commented especially in critical parts like BFS; whenever I have wondered or need to know something I have always been able to read the code and figure out what is going on.

So, I would not wait for someone else to document things like BFS any more than they already are, given the current state of things and how much time we wind up spending already.

2 Likes

I tried reading the code for it, maybe I’m just bad at this DX

I found this link for the Linux BFS: BeOS filesystem for Linux (vector.co.jp)

(Source Besly knowledge base)

mkp practicalfilesystemdesign\ 146x191 Title: Practical Filesystem Design

Publisher: MKP
Author: Dominic Giampaolo
Language: english
ISBN: 1-55860-497-9
Link: no Link

short description

The book Practical Filesystem Design is a description of the BeOS filesystem BFS. The author of this book is one of the developer of the filesystem.

You can get the book from the authors website as PDF

Nice, although the link you just deleted was much to my taste as well :wink:

I see to late that this is not based on Be FS, so i delete them

Ah yes, now I see. Thanks for explaining. Anyhow, the hands-on practical style is something that’s a natural fit for the way things work in my head, so hence my comment :slight_smile:

2 Likes