Apple has added journaling capabilities to its HFS+ Extended file system in a point.point update to the OS X Server software.

Journaling is a convenience feature for system administrators: it improves restart times after a crash on large volumes, as the system only needs to check the journal rather than every block on the disk. Linux users can take advantage of three journal file systems: ext3, ReiserFS and Silicon Graphics' XFS.

Like ext3 (tunefs -j ), but unlike some of its other counterparts, HFS+ journaling does not require the partition to be reformatted: there's a one button "Make journaled" option in the 10.2.2 Disk Utility program, or a command line alternative which allows BoFHs to enable journaling remotely via ssh.

The 10.2.2 update includes a improvements likely to be useful to users of the Jaguar desktop. There's a faster 'Find' (hurrah!) and a number of enhancements have been made to the revamped Jaguar address book, the very rudimentary interface to a new contacts engine that will play a critical role in establish the Mac as a smartphone and PDA-friendly system. (Given Microsoft's antipathy to Palm and Symbian, this is a shrewd move).

Last month eWeek reported (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,634711,00.asp) that Apple would be introducing the feature, codenamed "Elvis".

Earlier this year Apple hired Dominic Giampaulo, who wrote BeOS' journaling file system BFS. In addition to being a fast 64bit file system, BFS was designed to have database-like properties, making extensive use of file attributes. You can read about that in an interview we conducted back in February, here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24648.html) with Dominic and Benoit Schillings, author of BFS' predecessor Modal View Controller.

BFS database qualities were made possible by BeOS extremely low thread latencies - allowing it to index file attributes in the background. Whether OS X is yet up to snuff in this department is hard to say. An incremental "HFS++" that makes use of attributes is possible today, but could impose an unacceptable impact on performance. Performance remains a touchy subject around Cupertino: and no one wants to use a system that's dog slow (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19349.html).

Apple has been encouraging developers to move away from the traditional data fork/resource fork model for file typing. Whether it's planning for continued evolution or revolution, we can't yet say. ®

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