Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 08:41:48 -0400 (EDT) From: "Matthew N. Dodd" <winter@jurai.net> To: Mr M P Searle <csubl@csv.warwick.ac.uk> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: user-mode nfs daemon Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970612083351.12954H-100000@sasami.jurai.net> In-Reply-To: <1599.199706121229@richtea.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
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On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Mr M P Searle wrote: > I think last time this came up, the problem was that it would slow things > down - but there are lots of things (like html docs, large images, etc.) > that I'd want accessible, but I don't need often or quickly. > Also, it doesn't have to be slow. ArcFS on the Acorn claims to speed up the > HD. It does use an inefficient compression (like compress) and loads the > whole archive into memory first, but that's still fast on a 25MHz processor. > Maybe such a file system could use different compression methods depending > on how often you wanted the file - or even special ones for some file types > (eg images.) Most compressed file formats have a table of contents. Your filesystem layer wouldn't have to do anything with the file until the data would be accessed. I'm sure that the code could be fast-pathed to avoid performance problems for normal non arhive-file operations. Conceptually it sounds fairly straightforard if my understanding of what an be done at the VFS layer. As I've got no kernel hacking skills I really can't do more than say how nifty such things would be. *grin* I do know that I'll never use a command line archiver tool on my Win95 box again. Abstracting compressed files as directories is a completly logical and intuitive thing to do from a user point of view. Users don't care about such things, they only want access to the data. Terry, since you seem to have an opinion on such things, what is your view? For the sake of discussion... Have a good one. /* Matthew N. Dodd | A memory retaining a love you had for life winter@jurai.net | As cruel as it seems nothing ever seems to http://www.jurai.net/~winter | go right - FLA M 3.1:53 */
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