Large file systems

[Wm. E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <28819 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:

  I changed the subject on this, because it had drifted away from the
topic of my original posting.

| 4. Is the Unix file system, unenhanced, the right view for personal
| workstations with a few GB of disk? I would claim that the MacOS file
| system view has collapsed as an abstraction with the popularity of
| 300MB or larger disks, as cute as it was with a few files. Is there a
| similar threshold for the Unix system? It's 10PM, do you know where
| your sources are?

  No doubt at some point the tree analagy becomes cumbersome, and I
certainly think there's room for research, but the idea of grouping
things by function makes things a lot easier to understand.

  Would putting executables in one directory make it easier to
understand and backup? How about:
	new		was		contains
	----------------------------------------
	/bin		/bin		standard UNIX utilities
			/usr/bin (part)	distributed with *all*
			/usr/ucb	versions
	/bin/vendor	/usr/bin (part)	vendor speciffic software
	/bin/apps	/usr/bin (part)	application specific
	/bin/local	/usr/lcl/bin	site specific
I'm sure others would have ideas about organization of the filesystem to
be easier to understand.

  Now, your suggestion for research on a new model... sure! There are
lots of ways to group and access data, some tried and some as yet
undiscovered. Things like having things organized in multiple group (by
links), and having keywords and/or short descriptions associated with an
inode have been tried, and may inspire something better. There are whole
new ideas to be tried.

  Now, if we assume that vendors are shipping a SysV derivitive, is
there really an advantage to doing the research on a BSD kernel?
Certainly if most of the vendors are shipping SysV, they will not be
thrilled at having the development be done on BSD which is still related
to V7. If you build a new filesystem is there an advantage to using
something other than SysV for the starting point.

NOTE: I am assuming that the vendors who have joined OSF or UNIX
Internat. will be shipping a SysV flavor in 3-5 years, rather than BSD.
The original question was if there will still be advantages to using
BSD for anything, including kernel research.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at crd.GE.COM)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me