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Could I just create my own drive format?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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I mean, short answer is… yes…
But, eh, like. That’s a technicality. Chances are the task is something beyond typical individuals these days.
But we’re on Lemmy, and that comes with a huge selection bias. In fact, you don’t really find that many typical individuals here. A significant part of the population here uses Linux as a hobby, or does something technical for a living. Possibly both!
I really don’t think it’s that far fetched to imagine that it’s possible to find someone in here who has the time, energy, enthusiasm, patience knowledge and intelligence to build a new file system. I’m pretty sure you can also find more than one person capable of writing their own drivers or libraries.
sure. But it's a task that usually takes entire teams of highly competent and experienced people. Computer science, software engineering. Database management, lots of math.
Like ext4 took contributions from several orgs and numerous individuals over the course of years to develop. if a single person can do it, it's the work of a lifetime.
A guy is currently doing this with bcachefs.
He's also making life very hard for himself by being arrogant and terrible at communication, but that's a different story.
Isn't he just trying to do things his ways?
You could maybe describe it that way, but unfortunately that doesn't work in collaborative projects.
But I'd also disagree - if "his ways" require him to regularly and publicly shit on the work of other people & to misrepresent issues others have with him, he's arrogant and a dick.
Yeah, but that's like answering "Oreos, Jaffa Cakes, Biscoff, could I theoretically bake my own cookies?" with "It's a task that usually takes entire teams of highly competent and experienced people. Food scientists, industrial designers, supply chain management, factory design, lots of math"
Well, yes, but OP is not trying to make a product to compete with these examples, but clearly just to learn a bit about how computers work. The answer is absolutely yes – to both cookies and file systems – and they can both be done in one afternoon.
I wish to advocate in the name of DIY minimalism. That is to say, it's true that none of us -- Linus Torvalds is not in the room, right? -- can hope to churn out anything approaching a full-blown filesystem on the order of ext4 or NTFS if we worked our entire lives. But if those filesystems were the end-all-be-all of innovation in those spaces, the richness and intrigue of computer science would have died out long ago, relegated to only the pinnacle of engineers and no one else.
But I feel like that can't quite be the case, because all engineering is about achieving careful balances. And as fine as ext4 is, it must be said that it's anything but minimal. It's full-featured, which also implies that it might have more than what any one person requires. If OP wants to write a very compact filesystem designed for 8-bit microprocessors, I can't badger them with ext4's existence, because that's not going to be usable on an 8 bit machine.
Much like how Python includes a really tiny HTTP server, and we can all agree that it's orders of magnitude less sophisticated than nginx, such implementations can have their time in the sun. And I think a tiny, absurdly minimal, almost code-golf of a filesystem, might have a place in this world, if OP really wants to undertake that effort.
Computer science, I wish to believe, still has doors awaiting exploration.
There was a time where you could grab a walking stick, a cloak, and a pack and go see things no other human has ever recorded seeing; and then that exploration was done and we needed boats or whatever vehicle to get there. Then the boats had to get bigger, and had to be powered by wind rather than oar, then we had to go down, into the depths of the oceans, or up into the vastness of space. We still haven't explored all of the ocean, seen everything this world has to see.
with each new horizon, there is a new place to explore. a new richness to discover.
This is true, also, of computer science; and all sorts of other frontiers.
I'm not trying to disuade the OP or anyone else. Even if they're never even close to successful; it's their time to spend. if they enjoy the work; then by all means. It's more of a warning... it's not the kind of thing that's going to be a weekend project. ("There be dragons,")
Reminds me of something a coworker once told me. If you had a time machine and went back to the year 1825, there would be an absurd amount of basic chemistry you could discover. Some of it doesn’t even require any fancy equipment, but if you had a proper lab at your disposal, you could become famous in no time.
They’d probably burn you alive for Devil worship or something.
Don’t introduce anything too radical, so no tunneling electron microscopes just yet. However, you should be able to use empirical science to debunk BS ideas and move things along that way.
For example, the phlogiston idea was proven wrong in the 1770s when people started burning metals and realized their mass increased in the process. Also, certain compounds can release oxygen, which can maintain a flame in an otherwise empty container. Sounds simple to us now, but back in those days, it was revolutionary.
The idea is that you have to work within the framework available at the time.
And that's what gets them breaking out the pitchforks and torches.
Making something comparable with ext4 would probably take an autistic genius who dedicates their every waking moment to this project. Someone who eats, drinks and breathes numbers.
Other people can hope to make a fun little project that teaches them about file systems and storage hardware. Might not be a competitor to anything, but it doesn’t have to be. People like to tinker with all sorts of weird stuff, like installing doom on a toaster or something. The way I see it, this FS project is probably in that category.