Advanced Filesystem Implementors Guide Continues

Tom writes: "This is part six of the Advanced filesystem implementor's guide. I've been following an outstanding series of articles about implementing the advanced filesystems that are available with Linux 2.4. The author really knows his stuff and has done a great job with explaining Reiserfs, XFS, GFS, and the other file systems that are available." The series gets into greater depth as it goes on; you may want to start with Part One and work on from there.

Comments

NTFS ?

[bnatale]

I wonder when someone will finally remove the "DANGEROUS" tag from the NTFS write option and stabilize this thing...

File systems obselete?

[Peaker]

It seems to me, the more I think about it, that file systems should be buried in the past, as the idea of mapping a hierarchy of string identifiers to serialized objects is not quite the way to do it.

Firstly, a much better user interface to objects would be a relational database the user can query anything on.

As for a system interface to objects, why force the objects to be serialized? Use orthogonal persistency. This method is more efficient, and easier for the applications. It actually makes persistency transparent, except for critical applications, that need to persist something now in which case, they can use a journalling interface.

In summary:
- Replace file system persistency with orthogonal persistency.
- Replace the hierarchic-string uesr interface with a relational database.

Re:File systems obselete?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would appear that Hans Reiser agrees with you, at least in part. Check out Future Vision on the Namesys site. As the front page says, "the interesting stuff is still in the future." The killer file system they have now is just foundation work.