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State Of The Filesystem

Posted by timothy on from the upward-tilting-trend dept.

Skeme writes "Have you heard of Plan 9 or Reiser4 but don't know much about them? Are you curious about the improvements free software is making to its filesystems in general? Read my summary of the current developments in the filesystem: namely, what improvements we can expect (a lot), and what Linux and the BSDs can do to improve on the filesystem."

4 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Transferring Files by jhunsake · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've always wondered how these filesystems with metadata handle transferring files between different systems. It would suck to have all your MP3 info in filesystem metadata and then lose it all when you transferred to a system without fs metadata. Anyone have any insight?

    1. Re:Transferring Files by ThogScully · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I would think that would be prevented by the filesystem implementation. A filesystem's features are only as good as the implementation. So if you have fs metadata and are transferring it to another filesystem, whatever tool you are using to move the files, whether it be at a BASH prompt or drag and drop in Konqueror, should figure some way of properly translating data from one system to another without losing anything. Moreover, the tool should be able to do it without knowing any particulars about the actual types of filesystems in use. It's all in the implentation.
      -N

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    2. Re:Transferring Files by Surak · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well, remember Reiser4, for instance, is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT system than the standard POSIX filesystems (Reiser3, Ext2/3, UFS, etc.)

      The idea is that data is stored as in a database, and small files can be handled efficiently.

      Think of it this way: What *is* a filesystem? Really, it's a relational database. We don't tend to think of it as one, because it isn't implemented as one, but that's what the data it represents is. If you think of each file and directory and associated metadata as a record, with directories being pointer records to other records that show relationships.

      Anyways, code needs to be implemented to handle this.

      We use metadata NOW. A files permissions, owner/group info, date and time stamp, and even the filesize are metadata. We transfer those between different systems right now. With the correct transport method, this metadata doesn't get lost at all. A tarball can sit on any system no problem. Inside the tarball is all the POSIX metadata. That gets transferred from system to system.

      Of course, some OSes (read: Windows) don't handle Unix-style permissions correctly, so these are translated into rough-equivalent ACLs with systems such as Samba.

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  2. No need for LDAP? by jackalope · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It seems that the author presumed that the only use of LDAP is to provide passwords for user authentication. While that is a common use of LDAP it is not the only use.

    It would seem that having a file system that is LDAP aware could be extremely useful. Imagine if your LDAP tree were reflected as a tree in your file system. You wouldn't need to embed LDAP calls in your application, it would just be data in your file system. So looking up an attribute for the current user, or a user, would be as simple as reading a file that holds the value of the attribute.