On Tue, 7 Apr 2009, Stephan Lichtenauer wrote:
Am 02.04.2009 um 19:26 schrieb Robert Watson:
In the BeOS model, or my reinterpretation based on something I read a long
time ago and then presumably had dreams about, the split is a bit
different: the file system maintains indexes of extended attributes, which
are written by applications in order to expose searchable material. For
example, a mail application might write out each message as a file, and
attach a series of extended attributes, such as subject line, date, author,
etc. These extended attributes are then indexed automatically by the file
system in order to allow queries to be evaluated. I don't recall how
queries and results are expressed, and in particular, whether the queries
are processed by the file system (possibly exposed via special APIs or the
name space) or userspace (accessing special files maintained by the kernel
that are the indexes).
It's also worth observing that one of the authors of BFS was Dominic
Giampaolo, who now works on Apple's HFS+, and implemented fsevents there as
part of their Spotlight project.
Maybe you also might be interested that there is a PDF document (formerly
book) from Dominic available describing the BeOS file system in great
detail: http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/practical-file-system-design.pdf
Additionally, there seems to be a GSoC project to create something like
Spotlight for Haiku, the open source BeOS clone. You could browse through
the haiku-developer mailing list archives at
http://www.freelists.org/archive/haiku-development, the thread where this
has been discussed is titled "Need Some GSoC Advice" with the first mail
from 21 March.
Actually, I have a original copy of the book on the bookshelf behind me. :-)
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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