Re: Patent or not patent a new idea

[Graeme Sheppard <nodes@rillion.net>]

Neil Brown wrote:
> On Tuesday June 26, nodes@rillion.net wrote:
>> Posting it here seems the best thing to do.
>> 
>> To the inventor goes naming privilege and I'm calling this one softer raid.
>> It is a form of storage raid implemented in software, as contrasted to
>> software and hardware raid which are dependent on using required hardware.
>> 
>> To create a loop filesystem is straight forward. The commands are dd,
>> mkfs.*, mount -o loop. Basically what I propose is that the image file is
>> copied to another harddisk (in the case of ide not on the same cable) and
>> it too is mounted in conjunction of the original with cooperation. When a
>> read request for a block of say 100k is made, the kernel pulls 50k from
>> each disk - maybe a simple doubling of throughput.
> 
> Sounds a lot like "RAIF" - ask google for details.

I did not know about RAIF. RAIF "merges" separate filesystems? That is a
good idea in itself.

My idea is for driver that provides a filesystem from image files it
controls. Because it knows these resources it uses access in tandem to
attain performance.