Re: reiser4 plugins

Hans Reiser
2005-07-13T01:24:01Z

Neil Brown wrote:

>On Tuesday July 12, reiser@namesys.com wrote:
>
>
>>Neil Brown wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Maybe it is worth repeating Al Viro's suggestion at this point. I
>>>don't have a reference but the idea was basically that if you open
>>>"/foo" and get filedescriptor N, then
>>> /proc/self/fds/N-meta
>>>is a directory which contains all the meta stuff for "/foo".
>>>Then it is trivial to get the 'meta' stuff given a filedescriptor and
>>>if you have a pathname, you can always get yourself a filedescriptor.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>This sound like it might be cute, but filedescriptors are too heavy
>>weight for stat data accesses in quantity.
>>
>>In general, the whole file handle paradigm is too heavy for lightweight
>>files.
>>
>>
>
>That may well be true, but is completely orthogonal to filesystem name
>semantics.
>
>If you find file descriptors too slow, come up with an alternate (I
>suspect you have in the reiser4 syscall, but I haven't looked at
>that yet), implement it in the VFS, and show the world benchmarks of
>real-world applications that go faster with this new interface.
>
>I doubt that you would then have a great deal of trouble in getting
>the interface accepted (some trouble of course as you will need to
>convince a few people, but numbers speak quite loudly).
>
>I suspect that there might need to be a new internal interface into
>filesystems, and filesystems which don't provide that will not get the
>same speed benefit, but that is perfectly acceptable.
>
>NeilBrown
>
>
>
>
We need time, and then we can demonstrate sys_reiser4, it is not ready
for showing yet.....

Hans