From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S269190AbUHZRw4 (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:52:56 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S269083AbUHZQfW (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 12:35:22 -0400 Received: from smtp01.mrf.mail.rcn.net ([207.172.4.60]:48834 "EHLO smtp01.mrf.mail.rcn.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S269182AbUHZQcg (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 12:32:36 -0400 Message-ID: <412E10A2.1020801@pobox.com> Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 12:32:34 -0400 From: Will Dyson User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.3 (X11/20040819) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Hans Reiser Cc: Andrew Morton , hch@lst.de, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, flx@namesys.com, torvalds@osdl.org, reiserfs-list@namesys.com Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 References: <20040824202521.GA26705@lst.de> <412CEE38.1080707@namesys.com> <20040825152805.45a1ce64.akpm@osdl.org> <412D9FE6.9050307@namesys.com> In-Reply-To: <412D9FE6.9050307@namesys.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.85.0.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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