2023-07-30 06:16:05 -07:00
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<h1>Filesystems and APM: Week 1 of VoreStation Development</h1>
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<h5>2023-07-30</h5>
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<h4>written by Niko Chow-Stuart (Lead Developer)</h4>
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2023-07-30 06:21:51 -07:00
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<img src="/blog/posts/filesystems_and_apm/files.png" alt="drawing of the vap mascot in a drawer with two manila folders to the right"/>
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2023-07-30 06:16:05 -07:00
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<p>
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a large part of almost every operating system is its interface with storage mediums, and in almost all
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modern operating systems, this is done through a filesystem. this presents an impactful choice for the
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design of vap: what filesystem should we use?
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<br/>
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<br/>
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initially, we were planning on using the ext2 filesystem. it's relatively simple, pretty well-designed
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for UNIX-like systems, and is also one of the only filesystems on the OSDEV wiki with an article containing
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enough information to actually implement it. however, while an implementation of ext2 was being worked on
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at first, it was quickly discovered that some of the design choices made in ext2 were not ideal for a new
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operating system, mainly the apparent lack of support for 64-bit POSIX time (which i cannot actually
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confirm, as i've seen conflicting information on this).
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<br/>
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<br/>
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this led us to consider the berkley fast filesystem (ffs), which is a filesystem based upon the UNIX
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filesystem (UFS) used in BSD. it's main advantage over standard UFS is that it tries to allocate data
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more efficiently according to a physical hard disk layout, and also beats ext2 by having support for 64-bit
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POSIX time. however, while we were once again initially considering to use this filesystem, we decided
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against it as the documentation for it is very sparse, and all the implementations of it that we could
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find are very fine-tuned to the operating systems they were designed for (leading to how they're often
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referred to as "FreeBSD FFS" or "NetBSD FFS").
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<br/>
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<br/>
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after this, we decided to finally cave in and design our own filesystem. as this is a very large task,
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we've estimated that this may add a week or two onto the total development time of vap, but we believe
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that it will be worth it in the end. as the filesystem is heavily based off of the ideas of UFS, we've
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decided to currently refer to it as VapUFS (which may not be the final name), and in the true style of UNIX,
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VapUFS carries the UFS name while not necessarily being compatible with any of the other UFS
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implementations! the main differences between VapUFS and standard UFS implementations are that VapUFS
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by default journals all writes and stores directory contents in a b-tree. we may at some point change
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journaling to be more efficient as i am concerned about the potential performance impact of journaling
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everything, however we're planning to continue with these ideas until we can get a proper implementation
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that we can benchmark.
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<br/>
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<br/>
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as our work-in-progress implementation of VapUFS is not yet finished, the git repository hasn't been
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published. however, it will likely be public soon (possibly some point this week) and i'll leave an
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addendum here when it is.
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<br/>
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<br/>
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in other news, we've also gotten our implementation of the Apple Partition Map (APM) working! it will likely
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be made public along with the release of VapUFS, however it's currently not in a state where we're
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confident in its stability, so we're going to hold off on publishing it for now. we're also planning on
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working on a block device interface extension for our Rust OpenFirmware API, which will allow us to
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actually test our filesystem implementation on real hardware, which will be very exciting! i personally
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have a bit of experience with block devices on OFW, so i'm hoping that this will be a fairly
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quick task.
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<br/>
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<br/>
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that's all for the development progress of vap so far! i'm hoping that i'll be able to publish these
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blog posts on a weekly basis, however i'm not sure if i'll be able to keep up with that schedule.
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i should mention that as i'm currently the only developer working on vap, there may be some delays in the
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coming week as i'm expecting to be fairly busy with other things. otherwise, i'll hopefully be writing
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another post next week!
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<p id="footer">
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<br>contact us at <a href="mailto:nikocs@voremicrocomputers.com">nikocs@voremicrocomputers.com</a> <a
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href="/pgp.asc">pgp key</a>
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<span>image made by <a href="https://twitter.com/cathodegaytube/">@cathodegaytube</a>!</span>
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