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Comment by unhammer | Hacker News Reader

On that note, are there any fancy file systems that have acceptable Windows/Mac support? Or are we all doomed to using NTFS or exfat for USB drives that need to work on Linux/Mac/Windows?

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ZFS on windows: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenZFS-...

https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin

> Installing a binary release > > Enable unsigned drivers: > bcdedit.exe -set testsigning on

That seems only slightly less scary than the btrfs on Windows project (which suggests disabling SecureBoot). At least it's from a ZFS contributor (while btrfs on Windows seems like a from-scratch rewrite, ie. all the bugs all over again).

From the comments here I take it people aren't actually using anything with features like snapshots/cow/compression on Windows :-/

It won't work on an up to date Windows 10 because the latest updates of Windows 10 don't allow testsigning mode anymore.

This is somewhat like downloading an open source Android app from github, and saying it's scary that you need to go into settings and enable sideloading.

Microsoft has somewhat ridiculous driver signing requirements. I become angry about this perhaps once every four months.

I have a bit more skepticism about file system drivers than Apps.

I have used UDF for USB drives: https://superuser.com/questions/39942/using-udf-on-a-usb-fla...

Windows has ReFS. From the looks of it, it has some modern features. But I doubt that’ll ever be readable on a Mac.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS

> The ability to create ReFS volumes was removed in Windows 10's 2017 Fall Creators Update for all editions except Enterprise and Pro for Workstations,[4] which would seem to indicate Microsoft is no longer intending ReFS as a general replacement for NTFS, at least in the near future.

ReFS isn't meant as a mainstream FS. It's a pure storage FS that is meant to specifically work with backup applications for space saving purposes and with Hyper V. You can't even boot an OS off it, and the overhead from the block cloning technology simply cannot be compatible with normal OS usage.

There is a Btrfs driver.

https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs

(I have never used it, just have seen this refered in the ReactOS release announcement...)

Works very well. I'm using a subvol to store some Steam games on my btrfs formatted SSD.

There's quite a feature rich Btrfs kernel-mode FS driver for Windows[1]. Only heard of it, though, and never tried it myself.

[1]: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs

Apple has APFS, which might get a decent Linux driver soon, since Apple has recently published a fairly detailed description of how it works. Theoretically, nothing prevents someone writing a Windows driver too, which would allow APFS to become the modern standard for cross-platform requirements. Only I suspect that such Windows driver won't be free or common enough to make this practical.

There is a Windows driver for APFS from Paragon available. [1] Proprietary and commercial though. They also provide a free APFS to HFS+ conversion tool. HFS+ can be read from Linux though AFAIK without journaling support (essentially HFS).

[1] https://www.paragon-software.com/home/apfs-windows/

I suspected somebody like Paragon would have a driver for it, but it being commercial means the adoption rate is probably minuscule and would remain so.

I don’t get how there isn’t more demand for this, to me it’s such an obvious pain-point for personal computing these days. I guess the number of people dual booting OSes or even using external drives at all these days is so small? I feel like thumb drives are still very common though and getting large enough that it’s worth having a decent file system on them.

I don’t know about you, but I hardly transfer data from point a to b via physical means anymore.

It’s all network. So all I need is working file-transfer protocols.

There are ext2/3/4 drivers for Windows and macOS, but you need to install them. If you want seamless support, your best choice is FAT32. NTFS or ExFAT are good, though not all Linuxes support them of out the box.

The problem with Ext?, NTFS, and ExFAT is that you always need a driver on one of the 'big 3'.

FAT32 "seamless support"? It doesn't even have journaling. The other day I wanted to copy a 8 GB file. Forget FAT32. Just use Ext4. It isn't patent encumbered, and there are drivers available for all of the big 3. You can boot a live CD/DVD/USB to mount the data in no time. This is easier than installing any driver, and you won't have to uninstall or maintain it afterwards.

Try UDF, it's supported by Linux, Mac and Windows natively since it's the default FS for a DVD (ie, any computer OS that understands a DVD understands UDF). It supports files bigger than 4GiB, unicode filenames and up to 2TiB volumes with 512 byte sectors. It doesn't have journaling though but it is fairly reliable even without.

It's better than FAT and widely supported.

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