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johncolanduonilast Thursday at 4:12 AM1 replyview on HN

What warranties? I assume you’re comparing it to ext4 and not e.g. ZFS?


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speed_spreadlast Thursday at 1:23 PM

Here are a few

- mandatory byte-range locks enforced by the kernel

- explicit sharing modes

- guarantees around write ordering and durability

- safe delete-on-close

- first-class cache coherency contracts for networked access

POSIX aims for portability while NTFS/Win32 aims for explicit contracts and enforced behavior. For apps assuming POSIX semantics (e.g. git) NTFS feels rigid and weird. Coming the other way from NTFS, POSIX looks "optimistic" if not downright sloppy.

Of course ZFS et al. are more theoretically more robust than EXT4 but are still limited by the lowest common denominator POSIX API. Maybe you can detect that you're dealing with a ZFS backed volume and use extra ioctls to improve things but its still a messy business.

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