Interesting book on filesystems

[Eric Anderson]

Allan Fields wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 09:14:24PM -0500, Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
>>I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but just in case it hasn't:
>>
>>http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/
>>
>>Has a pdf of a "Practical File System Design..." book and a "File System 
>> Construction Kit".  I'm going to download and play with the kit - not 
>>sure if will work without too much trouble on FreeBSD.
>>
>>Eric
> 
> 
> I downloaded and read this one as well.  For a while I was looking
> in the stores, but it went out of fashion.  Thanks to the author
> for putting it online.
> 
> The idea behind BFS's extended attributes in the inode is different
> than the UFS 2 implementation, are you interested in seeing any
> further enhancements to file systems under BSD?.

I mentioned on the -current list that I'd *love* to have a clustered 
filesystem under FreeBSD.  I think it's the future of filesystems, much 
as journaling is becoming prevalent today.


> One idea floated was adding journalling and/or transactions to UFS.
> Then there is also the issue of cache coherency.

Scott Long is currently working on adding journaling to UFS.  I think 
he's making good progress.


> Another, is to start adding semantic enhancements to the file
> system.  In talking with Marshall Kirk McKusick, the prefered
> approach from a BSD perspective might be incremental addition
> of features in a way that will render UFS workable and w/o
> the likelihood of data loss/corruption much like the dirhash
> implementation.

Seems like filesystem innovation is not so popular these days, but I 
think with a little brainstorming some creative individuals could come 
up with some very powerful and unique solutions to problems we are just 
used to dealing with..

Eric



-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
A lost ounce of gold may be found, a lost moment of time never.
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