Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Will Dyson
2004-08-26T16:32:34Z

Hans Reiser wrote:

> Andrew, we need to compete with WinFS and Dominic Giampaolo's filesystem
> for Apple, and that means we need to put search engine and database
> functionality into the filesystem. It takes 11 years of serious

Hans,

I'm very curious about your ideas on how to put search engine and
database functionality into the filesystem. Although I've let the Befs
filesystem driver largely stagnate over the past two years, from time to
time I think about the problem of exporting to userspace the attribute
indexes that BeFS keeps on disk.

In the original BeOS, they solved the problem by having the filesystem
driver itself take a text query string and parse it, returning a list of
inodes that match. The whole business of parsing a query string in the
kernel (let alone in the filesystem driver) has always seemed ugly to
me. However, the best alternative I've come up with is to simply export
the index data as a special file (perhaps in sysfs?) and have userspace
responsible for searching the index. That would probably work, but it
wouldn't help other filesystems that implement even a different index
format, much less a different form of extra searchability.

--
Will Dyson
"Back off man, I'm a scientist!" -Dr. Peter Venkman