Ideas for changes to Unix filesystem

[Tom Christiansen]

>From the keyboard of igb at fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Ian G Batten):
:In article <BZS.91Feb4003139 at world.std.com> bzs at world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes:
:> Think of fixed length record files and inserting into them, it would
:> be nice to be able to just copy/munge the block numbers rather than
:> the data.
:
:What's needed is a version of streams for filesystems.  With Multics,
:the One True Operating System, you could attach modules (== push
:modules) such as vfile_ to provide additional functionality over and
:above that which you got from initiate_segment_ and its friends.  What
:would be nice with Unix would be ISAM, record mode, whatever modules you
:could push on top of the mmap interface.  Once you can map files into
:your address space most things can be done on top of that.

I think a good watchdog (file/inode daemon) implementation would allow
that.  See the paper is the proceedings from the next-to-the-last USENIX
in Dallas (about 3 years ago) for a description of the idea and one
implementation.

--tom
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