Looking at Longhorn 793
ShinyPlasticBag writes "Paul Thurrott has an excellent preview of Longhorn milestone five over at his Supersite for Windows. It looks like this may be Microsoft's equivalent to OS X -- the next version of Windows will have a 3D accelerated desktop and other graphical goodies. In addition to this, it will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years."
NEWSFLASH, NTFS is a journaling filesystem! (Score:5, Informative)
Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
I Didn't get a chance to fix the links to the images, so Here is the directory with a dump of them. [cofc.edu]
(And where is the Coward option?)
Journaling File System: for those who don't know.. (Score:3, Informative)
From whatis.com
A journaling file system is a fault-resilient file system in which data integrity is ensured because updates to directories and bitmaps are constantly written to a serial log on disk before the original disk log is updated. In the event of a system failure, a full journaling filesystem ensures that the data on the disk has been restored to its pre-crash configuration. It also recovers unsaved data and stores it in the location where it would have gone if the computer had not crashed, making it an important feature for mission-critical applications.
Not all operating systems provide the same journaling technology. Windows NT offers a less robust version of the full system. If your Windows NT system crashes, you may not lose the entire disk volume, but you will likely lose all the data that hadn't yet been written to the disk prior to the crash. By the same token, the default Linux system, ext2fs, does not journal at all. That means, a system crash--although infrequent in a Linux environment--can corrupt an entire disk volume.
However, XFS, a journaling file system from Silicon Graphics, became a part of the open-source community in 1999 and, therefore, has had important implications for Linux developers, who previously lacked such insurance features. Capable of recovering from most unexpected interruptions in less than a second, XFS epitomizes the high-performance journaling filesystem of the future.
The earliest journaling file systems, created in the mid-1980s, included Veritas, Tolerant, and IBM's JFS. With increasing demands being placed on file systems to support terabytes of data, thousands upon thousands of files per directory and 64-bit capability, it is expected that interest will continue to grow in high-performance journaling file systems like XFS.
Journaling FS (Score:5, Informative)
And OS X users have had for months [macosxhints.com]...
W
NTFS (Score:1, Informative)
NTFS (Windows 2000, Windows XP, et al.) is a journaling file system, actually.
Retards (Score:2, Informative)
And Windows users have had since... 1994? NTFS is journaling, and was WELL before e2fs was... (any of you old-school Linux users remember pulling the plug or hitting power on your Linux box back in the day and immediately screaming "OH SHIT!" when you realize you probably just corrupted a whole slew of data? I do.)
In Case of Slashdotting (Score:1, Informative)
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Longhorn Alpha Preview 3: Build 4015
With Windows Server 2003 behind us, it's time to turn our attention to the more exciting world of desktop computing, where Microsoft is slowly plowing through pre-beta milestones of Longhorn, it's follow-up to Windows XP. Due in late 2004 or early 2005, Windows Longhorn will offer sweeping changes over its predecessors and be the most significant release of Microsoft's desktop operating system since Windows 95. For developers, consumers, and business users alike, Longhorn is going to be huge. I've written a lot about this intriguing release (see my original Longhorn alpha preview and Longhorn alpha preview 2 for more information) but I present this third Longhorn alpha preview with some reluctance. Frankly, Longhorn hasn't changed much since the last alpha build I examined, and it's unclear what all the excitement is about. But 2003 is going to be a big year for Longhorn information, starting with an interesting little trade show next week in New Orleans. So here, at last, is my look at Longhorn build 4015. Suffice to say, things are going to start picking up soon.
WinHEC Preview: A new Longhorn shell is on the way
Since I first revealed the true nature of the new 3D video architecture in Longhorn, I've been besieged by requests for more information. Early in May, we may finally get that information, if the following technical content teaser for the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2003 is any indication. Note that the following text was provided by Microsoft to potential WinHEC attendees and is completely unedited. And yes, I am going to WinHEC.
WinHEC 2003 Tech Content Teaser: 3D Graphics Enhancements in the Next Version of Microsoft Windows The following extract is from "Graphics Hardware and Drivers for Windows Codenamed 'Longhorn'," an exclusive publication for WinHEC 2003 attendees which describes the enhancements to graphics capabilities and driver functionality in the next version of Microsoft Windows "Codenamed Longhorn."
3D Graphics Enhancements in Windows Longhorn Windows Longhorn will foster a major step forward in terms of how graphics hardware is used by mainstream Windows-based applications, from the Windows desktop to consumer and line-of-business applications. To achieve this enhanced desktop experience, a new Windows Longhorn Display Driver model has been designed to radically advance functionality, stability, and reliability. Coupled with acceleration provided by current and future graphics hardware, this new graphics driver model enables Windows Longhorn to deliver a higher level of performance, quality, and a new desktop experience.
In the past, the OS desktop has been a single graphics surface, and each window was defined as a region on this shared surface. Each application was responsible for drawing to only its window regions of the shared surface. Visually, windows appear to overlap and usually only the front-most window at any pixel is actually drawn.
The Microsoft Windows Longhorn desktop is being drawn in a completely different way than all previous versions. Every window will have its own, full window-sized surface to draw to. The desktop will be dynamically composed many times a second from the contents of each window. The goal for desktop composition is to enable compelling new visual effects for both the Windows user interface and for applications created by third-party developers shown on increasingly affordable high-density displays.
Examples of visual effects that will be enabled in Windows Longhorn include:
* Windows tumbling onto the screen.
* Rotating windows.
* Warped windows.
* Alpha blending between windows.
* Threads.
* Events and other synchronization objects.
The Windows Longhorn Driver Model allows for the visual effects seen on a user's desktop to scale relative to the availa
Re:Overhead? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:5, Informative)
Journaling file systems are transaction based. If a transaction fails partway through (IE the system crashes) the state of the disk is the same as if the transaction had never started, and is thus always consistent.
You would have to be doing something extra weird to risk corrupting an entire ext2 volume in the event of a crash. Also the article doesn't mention that ext3 IS ext2 with a journal added, it's not a totally different file system. In fact an ext3 file system that is cleanly unmounted can be mounted as an ext2 file system, FYI.
You are not correct (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Journaling FS (Score:3, Informative)
And what Windows 2000 users have had for years [microsoft.com].
Re:NEWSFLASH, NTFS is a journaling filesystem! (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know what the story submitter is smoking, but the lack of a journaling file system is what Microsoft used to bash Linux for. Now Linux has several, and Microsoft only has one (NTFS).
Re:OSX... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What I really resent about M$ (Score:5, Informative)
The submitter of the article was an idiot (Score:5, Informative)
They are integrating the filesystem with their SQL engine so that files are easily searchable with the multiple GB hard drives everyone will have by the time 2005 rolls around. The big feature is that it's a database filesystem called WinFS.
I guess the submitters of the article don't even read the articles anymore! Gotta love the quip at the end of the summary--makes him look even more moronic. NTFS has been a journalling file system since its inception. Many years before ext3 reared its ugly head.
Re:OpenGL 3D interface? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:3, Informative)
XFS, while I love it for its performance, journals metadata only. So files won't be lost, but their contents may be. ReiserFS is very similar. EXT3, while much clunkier, does data journaling as well. For these reasons I use XFS on
Re:NEWSFLASH, NTFS is a journaling filesystem! (Score:5, Informative)
Windows is still way behind what? Linux? You are a blind Linux zealot that doesn't know how to think or research for himself.
Try actually using Linux for development, using gdb and ddd and you'll cringe at how often it doesn't work as well as Visual Studio. I mean, yes, gdb does work and ddd does work most of the time, but more than often I had to reboot my entire machine because of some bug. The IDE is nothing compared to Visual Studio.
I love the ideals behind Linux and I completely support open source development, but I'm not blind to Linux's faults. I hate Microsoft, but I love NT and its descendants. Hate the company, love the technology.
Re:Please... (Score:5, Informative)
A 3D-accelerated desktop is just the logical next step after blitting acceleration from a 2D card.
Re:You are not correct (Score:0, Informative)
NTFS is probably the worst filesystem. It is difficult to manage, enterprise volume management is primitive at best, and most people with a real interest in real storage management would probably just get Veritas VXFS.
Want to convince yourself what a real journalled FS is? Try XFS for linux, and make the disk very, very busy. Then rip out the drive in the middle of it all. Reboot. No XFSfsck. Do the same on Windows 2000. chkdsk. Not journalled. Period. End.
If I have something important to store, I can say from experience that it's not ending up on a platter courtesy of NTFS.
Re:Parental Controls (Score:5, Informative)
Any application that uses PAM will automatically time-locked accordingly.
Re:Has anyone else noticed... (Score:5, Informative)
Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Disk Management
Select the partition, right click on 'Change Drice Letter and Paths' , select 'Change' and you'll be presented with two option. One is to mount the drive as a traditional letter, the other as a directory.
Windows 2000? (Score:3, Informative)
The submitter of the article was simply an idiot looking to mention "Linux" in some way in a Slashdot article summary.
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:3, Informative)
Dude, you should use a RAM-based filesystem for /tmp. You shouldn't rely on /tmp being persistent across a reboot.
I believe (if I'm not mistaken) ramfs is the way to go for /tmp. It's a RAM disk that can push to swap as needed. The reason you want to do this is that most temporary files exist for less than 30 seconds. Thus, there's never any reason to touch the disk for these unless there is simply not enough RAM.
If a RAM-based fs doesn't turn your crank, then just use the one that performs the best for losts of short-lived small to medium-sized files.
--JoeComment removed (Score:2, Informative)
"Stacks" in Longhorn... (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't much look like Apple's "Piles" but more like PARC's Hyperbolic Tree, of 1994 [parc.com]. This bit of software was spun off into a company named Inxight. Navigate their website [inxight.com] using a Hyperbolic Tree. (good to see they eat their own dog food.)
If M$ finds a good use for Hyperbolic Tree navigation in Longhorn, more power to them. I have played with it off and on since 1998 and have found that without a mega-huge (as in 1600*1200+) resolution screen, you can't get much out of it.
Re:Could someone please tell me if NTFS is journal (Score:2, Informative)
The poster made might not be aware of this.
Re:so i guess there's no difference... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No they are not... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:5, Informative)
That's just wrong on several levels.
First of all, the file system is not consistent after a crash: journaling file systems need to replay the journal in order to make it consistent. This is no different in principle from non-journaling file systems (which, traditionally, also have incorporated various features to permit recovery), it just happens to be faster.
Second, I/O APIs usually do not define a notion of "transaction" at the file system level, and even if they do, there aren't a whole lot of guarantees you can make that are particularly useful. In fact, journaling file systems and transaction-based file systems really are very different things. A journaling file system can be used to implement a transaction-based file system, but it can also be used just to implement fast recovery.
Third, for performance reasons, very few journaling file systems journal file content; they only worry about meta-data. And NTFS falls back a step further by making particularly weak guarantees. For example, if I create files "a", "b", and "c" in that sequence, with three separate programs, after a crash, any combination of those files may be present, and their content may be arbitrarily messed up.
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:5, Informative)
This news is biased (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Journaling FS (Score:3, Informative)
Neither of those are journaled filesystems. In the first case, I think you mean ext3 (ext2+journaling). In the second case, UFS has SoftUpdates...which has a lot of the same benefits as journaling, but isn't the same thing.
OS X Jaguar does, however, support journaling with HFS+:
OS X does not have any journaling stuff in the GUI (OS X Server does), but the commandline tools support enabling it. My laptop runs with journaling.
Re:Overhead? (Score:3, Informative)
Imagine, if you will, the modern equivilant of a sprite.
In fact, Mouse Pointers have been hardware sprites for a long time. They have their own chunk of memory seperate from the primary display buffer.
What the new GDI is going to accomplish is essentially putting all Windows in their own private memory space that is placed onto the screen by hardware, not software. The net effect is that things such as layering, transparency, and window refresh will be done automatically by the hardware, with almost no effort on part of the software designers.
So to answer your question, no, this will require LESS overhead, but more powerful hardware.
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:3, Informative)
This is not true. ext3 and ext2 have the same disk representation but they don't share code, at all. The fact that ext2 is mature doesn't really help ext3. People think ext3 is just ext2 with a few hacks to add journalling but it's actually a block level implementation of a journaling filesystem that just happens to use the same disk layout as ext2 for convenience. Your statement is sort of like saying that the NTFS code in Linux is mature because Windows has had NTFS for a few years now.
Re:NEWSFLASH, NTFS is a journaling filesystem! (Score:4, Informative)
If you do actually bother to do this test (I doubt it) do make sure you are using a system with NTFS volumes, not FAT32. Windows 2000 and XP do support both and FAT32 is NOT journaled and therefore can be left in an incosistent state. Windows will then run scandisk to try and fix it. Not the case with NTFS though.
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I know, Microsoft has NO plans on removing compatibility with older applications. I'm running Windows Server 2003, and I can still run Win16 apps as well as most DOS apps.
The parent is nothing but a troll. Yes, DRM in the OS is not a good thing. No, it will not have the profound impact that you think it will have. No one will stop you from running Linux on your computer.
DRM in the OS means very little. Application developers know that the adoption of a new OS is slow, and they will not do anything that would reduce their userbase.
Re:linux has no features I see in the screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
kdm. Easy to configure, many useful options. You can even configure it to log you in automatically. Switch on your machine, go make coffee, come back, you're logged in and ready to start work, your previous session restored.
kuser can do this for you. Linux distributors often provide their own tools for this, for example SuSE, whose admin tools are handily integrated into the KDE Control Centre.
Play around with kicker, the KDE panel. It does most of the stuff that Longhorn thing does, plus lots more stuff which they haven't done.
I expect Gnome does some or all of these things too; I picked KDE because it's what I know.
Rik
Re:NEWSFLASH, NTFS is a journaling filesystem! (Score:3, Informative)
MS' "innovation" (Score:3, Informative)
(2) Check out MS' media-player thing on the 'dock'? Can we say "appicon"?
Really, where is all this innovation MS is talking about?
That spider-web like file-system navigation? Nothing new. There were 3D versions of stuff like that back in 1994 with Jurassic Park.
The problem MS and Apple face is that there really isn't anything much more to do. WindowManagers are already pretty much ok. Maybe a few tweaks here and there would fix minor flaws. However, nothing particularly major need be done. It's sort of like the design for the trashcan (real-life). When was the last innovation in trash-cans?
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Informative)
No, but I hear you can get a 15.2" widescreen 1Ghz PowerBook for around $2800. With slot-loading DVD-R/CD-RW. And built-in wireless networking (nevermind the built-in gigabit ethernet). And half a gig of ram and a 60GB hard drive. And Radeon 9000/64MB graphics. And, to top it all off, the best desktop OS ever created.
I'll take a slightly thinner wallet for that.
Not True! (Score:5, Informative)
Look here [kuro5hin.org] for one of several knowledgeable accounts of the history behind Microsoft's TCP/IP stack that are floating around the web.
Please be more careful before you declare that something has been proven.
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit029.html#longh
"Current Windows based software will not be compatible with the Longhorn filesystem".
Re:NEWSFLASH, NTFS is a journaling filesystem! (Score:2, Informative)
This is so rubbish... Been beta testing NT since Alpha of 3.1.
The only apps that failed on NTFS were apps that directly modified the hard drive file structure like Norton Disk Doctor.
Programs like WordPerfect or 99.9% of normal programs could see and SAW no difference in the file system. THAT IS WHAT AN OS DOES, ABSTRACT THE HANDLING OF INPUT/OUTPUT FROM THE APPLICATION AND/OR USERS. Geesh.
NT hands the files to the applications whether it is NTFS, FAT32, or even back in the day HPFS.
The application didn't know or care what the file system was, and most applications still don't - unless they are messing with the file system table directly, and VERY VERY few programs do this....
Geesh...
I was running Doom on NT 3.1 in 1992 and every other Win 3.1 or Win32 program I owned at the time, the only ones I couldn't run on NTFS was Norton Disk Doctor or something like Stacker. Geeeeesh....
Even today, NTFS is completely transparent to the applications, that is how the OS is engineered. This is why you can have a compressed or encrypted NTFS file and ANY application just sees it as a normal file. The NT core handles decrypting or uncompressing the file for read and write access, not the programs.
The same for Volume Shadowing in Win2003 Server, the applications don't care or know about version control, NTFS and the NT core just handle it.
Would someone here please read a book on NT or actually use WindowsXP before getting on the soapbox to tell us how it does or doesn't do this or that...
I see more WindowsXP/NT ignorance in here than I see Linux/Unix ignorance in an AOL newbie room.
In the Microsoft groups, they know Linux/Unix far better than the posters here know WindowsXP or the NT core, and that is a sad thing.
If you want UNIX or Linux or Open Source to succeed, then you BETTER KNOW YOUR competition.
I was reading an article just a couple of days ago about 'great new upcoming features' in a Linux variant, and the article was filled with errors when comparing it to NT technology, stuff NT had been doing since 1992 and they were making it sound like NT either just got the technology or didn't have it.
Come on guys, if you don't know, then find out, don't pretend like you do.
Just like the original post, it was completely inaccurate about NT and the upcoming Longhorn.
And comparing the 3D interface of Longhorn to what is in OSX now is just ridiculous.
The UI of OSX is still a 2D rendering engine laying on the 'core window manager'. Sure it supports OpenGL, Quartz, etc; but WindowsXP also supports OpenGL, and DirectX, it doesn't mean that either are a part of the basic UI Window Manager. OSX does NOT have a 3D Window Manager system for the basic Window UI. If it did, you could tilt windows back, or skew them to the side or push them back in a 3D space on the desktop. Period.
Read, please read before posting and know what the hell you are talking about...
I fall on the NT/Unix fence and I am just ashamed of my fellow geeks here when it comes to bashing NT with no knowledge of NT whatsoever.
Re:NEWSFLASH, NTFS is a journaling filesystem! (Score:2, Informative)
For example, you will need Nortons for file system X and Nortons for file system Y and Nortons for file system Z. So, which one does Symantec pick in this case? And once Joe User figures out that his favorite utilities don't work, which file system will he want to use?
Having too many choices in what is considered a low-level system function will hurt the market, not help it.