The future of the Linux filesystem

The future of the Linux filesystem

Posted Nov 6, 2003 2:38 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
Parent article: The future of the Linux filesystem

Y'know, SOME kind of database would not necessarily be a bad thing for filesystems. As it is now, we have slocate, which works for files that are already there, but not when you put new ones on, unless you redo the whole db after doing so. CRON jobs can pick up the slack of updating it every night or so, but that's still not the same as having a reliably up-to-date database for your files.

Perhaps hacking Berkley DB support into the VFS layer, such that it records file names to a database on disk? This would avoid the code duplication of having each filesystem use its own scheme. A locating program could then just query the database. I don't know how feasible this is, really, because I'm not a kernel hacker, but if it could be made to work okay, it'd be pretty nice. No more running slocate cron jobs in the middle of the night, or lengthy disk searches using find(1).

Needless to say, this would be 2.7 work.

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