Talk:Virtual file system

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Any references to Sun creating the VFS? I seem to recall it first appeared in some form in Research Unix, but I can't find the reference for that either. Lost Goblin 05:50, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Seventh Edition didn't have it; Eighth Edition might have had it, but it wasn't made widely available, and it came out in 1985, about the same time SunOS 2.0, the first SunOS with a VFS, came out. Guy Harris 09:17, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
I have heard from someone that was at the Labs at the time that PJW had a VFS layer in '84. VFS was certainly part of 8th Edition. But the exact date 8th Ed was released outside the Labs scapes me at the moment.Lost Goblin 19:21, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Implementation of single-file virtual filesystems

If we talk of files, which "internal structure [access] ... is often limited to programs specifically written", rather than filesystems written to support standard files API, then there should be much more examples.

  • Microsoft COM compound file, which examples are MS Office files, MS Management Console files, etc.
  • To some extent - MIME-HTML files and DBX files (e-mail storage by Outlook Express), where files can be accessed independently, but usually are not.
  • OASIS OpenDocument (technically it is ZIP with bunch of files, and Office suite works with those files)
  • Quake WAD files (at least in Alice McGee it is also a ZIP file) and other games' packages,
  • Sun Java .JAR files, that are some variation of ZIP too.

All of those formats feature having a set of data chunks with specified name, size and type. Essentially that is exactly what files are - named chunk of data. And if we remove requirement to make it accessible to any program via standard file I/O API and only request that programs, using them, do read and write data chunk by name, then all those examples above are valid and much better than the exotic WinUAE and VmWare. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.44.136.228 (talk) 08:16, 9 November 2007 (UTC)