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BeOS for the Internet: BeIA
askwar writes "Heise reports in this article that Be Inc. is to debut their BeIA dubbed operating system for Internet Appliances today at the DEMO 2000 in California. According to Heise, BeIA will support Real's G2 and Macromedia's Flash. Another nice thing is the file system of BeIA, which will be database like, and allows the users to create their own file types with special attributes. This, and the ability to search for specifically search for these attributes, the system will be suited very well for technical/scientifical applications, says Heise. The article on Heise is in German, so you either have to learn it :-], or go to the Babelfish. "
That sounds somewhat like BFS, the BeOS file system, as described in Practical File System Design with the Be File System. The BeIA file system may be BFS, or a variant thereof (the Be press release says "At the foundation of BeIA are a core set of system functions, leveraged from BeOS, which talk directly to the individual hardware designs.")
Section 4.8 "Attributes" of that book says that a file (or can have) associated with it a directory (not part of the normal directory hierarchy; the only reference to it is, presumably, via the file's inode), and in that directory are files that correspond to the file's attributes, with the name of the attribute being the name of the file and the value of the attribute being the contents of the file. They later added a mechanism to store small attributes in the inode itself.
(ReiserFS might obviate the need for such a mechanism, although, from the stuff on ReiserFS, having a separate name space for attributes might be considered an anathema.)
BFS also supports indices of attributes, allowing searches for files with particular attributes.
Here's the press release from Be themselves (in English): Press Release