On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 12:12 PM, Orvar Korvar <knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Would this be possible to implement ontop ZFS? Maybe it is a dumb idea, I > dont know. What do you think, and how to improve this? > > Assume all files are put in the zpool, helter skelter. And then you can > create arbitrary different filters that shows you the files you want to see.
So why not pipe ls through grep? > As of now, you have files in one directory structure. This makes the > organization of the files, hardcoded. You have /Movies/Action and that is it. > But if you had all movies in one large zpool, and if you could > programmatically define different structures that act as filters, you could > have different directory structures. > > Programmatically defined directory structure1, that acts on the zpool: > /Movies/Action > > Programmatically defined directory structure2: > /Movies/Actors/AlPacino > > etc. > > Maybe this is what MS WinFS was about? Maybe tag the files? Maybe a > relational database ontop ZFS? Maybe no directories at all? I dont know, just > brain storming. Is this is a dumb idea? Or old idea? Old idea - I remember systems that did this or variants of it a really long time ago. However, there you knew ahead of time what applications you were going to run. Does it make sense to fold this sort of intelligence into the filesystem, or is it really an application-level task? (And then remember that the filesystem can be accessed by an almost infinite array of applications, not to mention remotely over NFS or CIFS - how would they make sense of what you might build?) Talking of NFS, you could imagine some sort of user-level nfs server atop the filesystem that presents different views. Or other layered filesystems (mvfs, for example) that present a modified view. That seems a more fruitful approach than trying to build this into ZFS itself. The problems then become: what additional metadata do you need? (You can hide the metadata in extended attributes if you don't want it obviously visible.) And how do you keep the metadata in sync with the real data in the face of modifications by applications that aren't aware of your scheme? -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
