News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

Wouldn't they use UFS or ZFS for BSD?

 

It would make a lot more sense to use UFS or even XFS. But it wouldn't be difficult to include ntfs-3g if they so wished. I don't see the point in using ZFS, it's more aimed at enterprise solutions than home use.

 

Is UFS or XFS or ABCDEFS compatible with PC? Because i expect users to want to be able to plug-and-play devices to copy content over. If you have to format a USB device to work with PS4, it'll lose a great deal of its value. I guess FAT32 will still be compatible, but Sony don't really want to have to worry about support issues for people having trouble accessing their content.

 

The biggest issue is the 4GB file limit on FAT32. This coming generation is going to breed files of monstrous size. You'll need a modern FS that can cope with multi GB files. NTFS can do this, so can UFS, XFS etc.

But I think that VFAT will cover all the bases anyway!?

 

I don't care how they do it, but if they don't find a way for users to play their >4GB video files on their PS4, a lot of people will be seriously upset.

 

What about Cinavia? You don't have any problems with that?

 

A Raspberry Pi can play all videos I downloaded from Digital Foundry, so that should not be a problem.

 

There are lots of ways to do that on the PS3 today.

 

With "PC", do you mean Windows?

 

There is also exFAT, which doesn't have drawbacks of the FAT32. And according to wiki microsoft allows to license it.

 

They obviously can, there are no known patents ... it's just too risky, without an official specification it's too easy for Microsoft to tweak something which doesn't affect their code but screws with the PS4.

 

How would you port it over though? I mean it's embedded in the OS. I know there's open source options but I just can't see basing the core FS of your multi-billion dollar product on an open source hack driver.

 

Yep.

 

I'd guess that the internal FS used by the PS4 will be either a Reiser or XFS based one. These support advanced security features like on the fly encryption but have a substantially lower overhead than NTFS.

External drives are a different beast entirely. But as has been pointed out already there are easier methods of getting your data to and from your devices. The underlying FS should have no impact on the availability of the data.

 

Sony based their whole OS on "an open source hack".

 

MS can't "tweak" NTFS. Also, it was released in 1993. Any applicable patents should be expired now.

 

I love XFS and I use it almost everywhere, but my bet is on either JFS or UFS. They use less CPU power than most FS, so the small core in the south bridge will be thankful.

OTOH, XFS, and specially ZFS and butterFS, are a bit overkill for a console, it's a huge number of features that are only useful with lots of spindles, raid, online grow/shrink, snapshot, quotas, etc...

Seriously, the only feature I care about is TRIM for my future SSD

 

Trim won't be necessary as you won't be writing enough random writes to the drive for it to make much of a difference. The drive's own garbage collection should handle things just fine, unless the firmware's trash (which is rare today.)

 

I thought the 4GB media limit on PS3 was only on the external File System.
It would be fairly easy for Sony to license exFat from MS and lose the restriction on PS4.