On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Rainer Orth wrote:
Eric Lowe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Frank Hofmann wrote:
sorry opensolaris-discuss, this originally bounced. Trying again.
We're proposing a generic "fs-discuss" for OpenSolaris.
Any reason why we shouldn't have a generic filesystem community? You're
[ ... ]
<humour>
I'm shy. I'm not a leader. So I'm not proposing a thing that may turn me
into a figurehead.
</humour>
While funny, there's some truth to that. A mailing list is such a simple
thing, contribute + discuss, while a community is more - maintain webpages
for it, have T-shirts created for the leaders, do regular meetings (?),
moderate, propagate it on OSOL-UG meetings, whatever - one has to like
this kind of work and the publicity involved, and quite frankly, I feel
uncomfortable with such a task. It reeks of project management to me, and
I for one do agree that project managers deserve compensation for pain and
suffering ...
So, deeply personal reasons for me not shouting "I want a community".
FrankH.
That's exactly what my already mentioned proposal at
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=28219渻
suggested:
Speaking of which, it occured to me recently, when I posted a question
about the interaction of zfs, automount/autofs and nfs to nfs-discuss and
zfs-discuss, but got no reply whatsoever
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=6717&tstart=0
that a different organization of the filesystem and storage related
communities might be much better than what we currently have:
I can think of two models here:
* Create a new filesystems community to subsume the existing zfs, ufs and
nfs communities as projects. There might be a new autofs/automount
community as well, and the recent proposal for a cifs community would
naturally fall in as a cifs project, as has already been suggested.
The problem is what to do with svm, which doesn't fall under filesystems.
* Therefore, an alternative model would be to use the storage community
(given that block and object based storage are getting closer recently,
cf. the object storage devices work for SCSI) as an umbrella for both
block-based storage (e.g. iscsi, svm projets, maybe others?) and
filesystems (with the projects mentioned above).
i.e. create a generic Filesystems community and grandfather the existing
FS-related communities as projects, maybe adding more related projects at
the same time.
proposing a discussion list, plus there is work afoot by yourself and
possibly others to document filesystem interfaces. There are FS ports to
OpenSolaris (ext2, FUSE). And, as someone pointed out recently on
opensolaris-code there is a kit (albeit outdated now) for writing a simple
filesystem for education purposes which is portable across many systems
including OpenSolaris kernel.
That was probably me, speaking of Erez Zadok's FiST work on stackable
filesystems:
http://www.filesystems.org/
The current version only includes a Solaris 7 template, but since it's
based on lofs, it seems to be relatively easy to port forward to Solaris
10+. I've already started investigating what it takes to do so, but got
distracted due to several other projects. I had planned to propose a FiST
project when I get a bit spare time for that.
Besides, I've already contacted Erez about the license: he's willing to
re-license the code under whatever license is appropriate for eventual
inclusion in OpenSolaris if it should ever come to that.
I think FiST offers great potential for filesystem work, given that there
are Unionfs
http://www.filesystems.org/project-unionfs.html
and xCachefs (which might even become a successor to Solaris CacheFS):
http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/docs/cachefs-tr/index.html
Filesystems seem as alive and well as anything is alive and well in
OpenSolaris that has a community now.
That's certainly very true, and could become even more so with more
documentation available on the Solaris VFS interface.
Rainer
--
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
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No good can come from selling your freedom, not for all gold of the world,
for the value of this heavenly gift exceeds that of any fortune on earth.
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