Re: Things that Longhorn seems to be doing right

Wichert Akkerman
2003-10-30T08:17:42Z

Previously Hans Reiser wrote:
> It is true that there are many features, such as an automatic text
> indexer, that belong in user space, but the basic indexes (aka
> directories) and index traversal code belong in the kernel.

Sure, but if you have a kernel which supports arbitraty extended
attributes for files you don't need much more kernel support. You
can implement things like metadata for files and query languages on
top of that in userspace. If you modify applications to (also) put some
metadata (meta tags from html pages, document properties from office
documents, etc.) in those extended attributes you might already be where
microsoft is going.

You only would need some kernel interaction if you want to keep an
updated index of file contents (dnotify for a while filesystem and
reindexing whole files instead of blocks doesn't sound very attractive).

Wichert.

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http://www.wiggy.net/ It is hard to make things simple.