Recently, I looked at some options implementing unusual file systems in userland.
On Linux, there is LUFS and similar stuff which frees one from touching any kernel code. The design is always similar: a generic kernel module forwards calls to a user level daemon and forwards returned results back. The user level daemon implements or serves as a basis for unusual user land filesystem implmentation.
However, LUFS is not available on Windows and I'm not aware of somehting similar ..
So I've looked after an alternative for LUFS portable across at least over Windows and Linux and probably POSIX, *BSD and MacOSX. I did not
found anything .. my conclusion was, that one has to go e.g. and use
the "MS Installable File Systems Development Kit" and build a kernel
mode driver which forwards calls to a user mode daemon (pretty much
the LUFS design). I'm unwilling to take that level of pain.
Next idea was to use the Samba _server_ code as a basis to built the unusual FS on top and just run the Samba server colocated/locally on the desktop machine. Great reuse.
Here are the two main questions:
1. Is it possible to build/run the Samba _server_ on Windows
(e.g. using Cygwin)? 2. Is there a "reasonable" internal API within the Samba server
which could be used to stack unusual FS stuff on top?Generally, IMHO it would be great to have an open standard C API to some portable user land daemon to implement portable user land file systems.
Cheers, Tobias -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
