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- From: baker@westsd.dco.dec.com (Art Baker)
- Subject: Re: Info on NTFS internals ?
- Message-ID: <1992Nov5.155204.19448@decuac.dec.com>
- Sender: news@decuac.dec.com (USENET News System)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: westsd.dco.dec.com
- Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
- References: <1992Nov2.164603.21540@decuac.dec.com> <1992Nov04.053326.643@microsoft.com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 15:52:04 GMT
- Lines: 45
-
- In article <1992Nov04.053326.643@microsoft.com> alistair@microsoft.com (Alistair Banks) writes:
- >
- >Please will you be much more specific about what things in NTFS
- >you are trying to learn
- >
- >Features? These are surfaced in the published Win32 API (though I
- >could summarise them again, as I have done before on this forum)
- >
- No, not just its features. As you point out, these are well documented
- in the Win32 API publications.
-
- >On-Disk sector layout? This is not publicly available at this time
- >
- Yes, the way space on a physical disk is allocated and managed would be
- very helpful.
-
- >Mechanisms involved in implementing its features? These live in the
- >code of the OS, and as such are competitive advantage for the OS, and
- >like other parts of the source code, are only available to licensees
- >
- It would be possible, I believe to desribe the algorithms/methods used
- by the NTFS driver without revealing anything that would put Microsoft
- at a competitive disadvantage.
-
- My own employer, Digital Equipment, has published an entire book
- describing both the on-disk block structure *and* the interaction of the
- Files-11 XQP for VMS. Similar documentation exists for OSF/1 and most
- other flavors of UNIX.
-
- As to why: Because it's nearly impossible to write high-performance
- code that treats the entire disk-subsystem as a black box. This is going
- to be particularly true if/when WNT becomes the OS of choice on large
- server-machines. In these kinds of disk-intensive environments,
- information about the disk-subsystem's allocation strategies, locking
- policies, buffering schemes, etc, becomes crucial to squeezing the greatest
- number of I/O's out of the system. A simple list of file-system features
- does not meet this need.
-
- Regards,
-
- --
- ***********************************************************
- * Art Baker | Joy and fierceness... *
- * baker@westsd.dco.dec.com | *
- ***********************************************************
-