deja vu

Posted Aug 25, 2005 3:09 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

not very.

the thing with the reiserfs was to create files that contained attributes (represented as a subdirectory) as well as data

this is the plain old directory-is-a-directory and file-is-a-file approach (with the addition that creatign a directory triggers a callback to create files in that directory)

nothing new that would break existing tools here, unlike the reiser4 combo-file proposal

Posted Aug 25, 2005 3:11 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

No. ReiserFS is based on the idea of plugins used for manipulating the user-level contents and meta-data for a file. It can be used to turn /etc/passwd into a directory of files, so that your two line shell script with sed and awk can become a two line shell script with cat and ls. (Jibes aside, there are some other theoretical uses that could make life a lot easier for developers and administrators.) ReiserFS exposes plugins based on content stored within the ReiserFS file system itself, and not external data like from the kernel.

ConfigFS is a file system designed solely for exposing kernel structures and allowing addition of new entries and changes to those structures. The file system is self contained and mounted in its own unique location, and does not share the mount namespace with regular files like ReiserFS.

Logically, from a user perspective, these are two feature sets are almost the same thing. Internally, however, they are truly different. I suppose, in many ways, it's like saying that OpenLDAP and Active Directory look alike - they're both directory servers, both speak LDAPv3, but they really aren't the same internally and have very different goals and implementations.

Posted Sep 1, 2005 19:35 UTC (Thu) by pivo (guest, #32229) [Link]

No, it doesn't sound like reiser4, but it would really benefit from the
new reiser4 syscall.

To set up a nbd device from the example requires many syscalls to
open/write/close the directory and individual files. With reiser4
interface it would likely take only a single syscall. See
http://namesys.com/v4/v4.html#reiser4_call