On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 05:19:11PM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote: > Remember that reiser4 allows you to operate on little pieces of data, > glueing and rearranging them inside files (something like that). > > No other filesystem has that capability, and it's a data model which > the fancy features (when they exist) will use. > > You can map those pieces to underlying directories and files and > renames and unlinks, so that the fancy stuff works on other > filesystems, but it would be a useless model because those other > filesystems wouldn't be recognisably "ordinary" files any more. > > For reiser4 to expose that model through a VFS interface, and the > fancy stuff to use it through the VFS interface, and for the fancy > stuff to work (even imperfectly) on other filesystems which don't > offer those operations, some kind of fall-back "store metadata and > fragment rearrangements in auxiliary files with special names" layer > would be requied. That's a big job.
I seem to miss those files in the current implementation. But again the big question is how will the interface look? If the smaller objects interact with normal files (link/rename, contained in normal directories), they will have to obey the same locking protocols. If not a filesystem could experiment with it of course.