Because they might as well not even be file systems. They're just data structures that the OS developers control for storing data. You can run Linux with an almost empty tmpfs root file system, and barely touch the file system at all. There's nothing fundamental about file systems other than being the most prominent way to allocate and track persistent storage space.
It sounds like SQLite still requires a couple dynamically sizeable files for storing the database, so it probably isn't possible. You'd have to have a key-value store that can allocate blocks for the different files it needs.
It seems really bizarre to me, because you'd think a large tech company would have found a performance reason for throwing out the file system and disk partitions and using the device directly for storage, but it doesn't seem like that's happened yet. Probably wouldn't even be that hard for a team at a big company to implement a basic file system stripped of all the hierarchical/metadata stuff and use that.
I guess it really comes down to the fact that every application needs something like the program heap to store variable sized objects, and the file system is the closest thing to that currently.
Android and iOS still have file systems, the user just isn't allowed to look at them
even on mac they make it obnoxiously hard to browse outside of a short list of curated user folders.
Because they might as well not even be file systems. They're just data structures that the OS developers control for storing data. You can run Linux with an almost empty tmpfs root file system, and barely touch the file system at all. There's nothing fundamental about file systems other than being the most prominent way to allocate and track persistent storage space.
Has anybody tried making a partition that’s really just a sqlite3 binary blob?
It sounds like SQLite still requires a couple dynamically sizeable files for storing the database, so it probably isn't possible. You'd have to have a key-value store that can allocate blocks for the different files it needs.
It seems really bizarre to me, because you'd think a large tech company would have found a performance reason for throwing out the file system and disk partitions and using the device directly for storage, but it doesn't seem like that's happened yet. Probably wouldn't even be that hard for a team at a big company to implement a basic file system stripped of all the hierarchical/metadata stuff and use that.
I guess it really comes down to the fact that every application needs something like the program heap to store variable sized objects, and the file system is the closest thing to that currently.