From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jul 30 14:49:49 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id OAA10502 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 30 Jul 1996 14:49:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA10472; Tue, 30 Jul 1996 14:49:40 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id OAA00719; Tue, 30 Jul 1996 14:48:55 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199607302148.OAA00719@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Union mounts and other mounts To: michaelh@cet.co.jp (Michael Hancock) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 14:48:55 -0700 (MST) Cc: phk@critter.tfs.com, toor@dyson.iquest.net, freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Michael Hancock" at Jul 26, 96 10:17:09 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > I understand that Jeff's Lite2 work needs to be incorporated before > any fs commits can be made. Yes. They are the baseline. Kirk's work is somewhat of a monkey wrench, since it will change the baseline, perhaps significantly: I don't know how he is going about the soft update integration. I exchanged some email with Ganger right after the paper came out, and he seemed reluctant to go for a generic implementation using graph reduction theory. I don't know whether to blame it on graph theory, group theory, and topology being ...ahem... rather esoteric, or that once you have an FFS that has it, you shouldn't need any other FS. 8-). > I think we're a ways off from any fs commits anyway. There's been very > little analysis on this mailing list of the direction the file systems > might be taking. Actually, there's been quite a lot of stuff on this, at least for local storage. What's been missing is distribution and replication. The "WebNFS" modification is an easy hack. As I stated on Usenet, it's pretty obvious that it's for downloading to embeded systems without local storage -- ie: set top boxes. Vendor | FS | For download of ----------------+---------------+------------------------ Microsoft | CIFS (SMB) | ActiveX (OLE) controls Sun | WebNFS (NFS) | JAVA Applets ----------------+---------------+------------------------ I don't think this is a direction we need to worry about for quite a while. More interesting is transactioning, reliability, and multifile idempotentence (Tuxedo-like capabilities for transaction interdependence). Other directions include componentization (one FS quota module, etc.), hosted metadata for interoperability (one hosting module, ala UMSDOSFS), and event notification to user space processes (ie: "file browser, the directory whose icons are presently being displayed, has changed") to get rid of polling and go more towards a user interactive model, etc.. Transient connectedness and replication are already being looked at by the Japanese "Nomads" group. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.