Re: Looking for a project...

Tim Newsham wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi guys,
> >
> > 2) What's the preference? My first inclination is towards BSD since
> > that's what I'm more familiar with. But, it seems that more people
> > on the list are using Linux so it may be more helpful to write one for
> > it.
>
> My vote is for BSD. I already have several BSD partitions on
> my machine so the reason is obvious :). I also heard some rumours
> about linux's ext. fs not being so great.

The ext fs wasn't so hot and has been pretty much abandoned. ext2 is much
better. The benchmarks floating around in the Linux development groups seem
to suggest that ext2 is on a par with BSD.

I know that there's been mention of both ext2 and minix servers on this list
but I don't know what's happened yet.

If you plan on doing ext2 you'll find that as well as the kernel source
implementation there's now a HURD server.

FWIW the thing I'd like to see (and if I ever get a spare few hours I'll
look into doing) would be to write something like the Linux umsdos fs. For
the non-Linux types on the list, this basically takes a standard dos fs but
uses a special file (if present) in each subdirectory to manage additional
attributes such as ownership and to provide additional filename space. The
beauty of such a system is that it's overlayed on top of the dos fs and
doesn't stop it from being used normally under dos (it's just some of the
dos versions of long filenames can look a bit strange).

In VSTa such a server could be implemented as something that layers on top
of an existing fs to provide VSTa permissions and enhanced timestamping -
for now this only really applies to the dos fs but the same technique could
be applied to any "restrictive" fs.

What would be an interesting project would be to extract all of the
commonality from the current fs's and create a multithreaded fs library that
would manage block caching etc and that could be used for creating any new
fs. I think HURD has something like this.

                Regards,
                Dave
Received on Thu Sep 22 00:20:14 1994