From: mcdermot@daedalus.cs.unm.edu (John McDermott) Subject: Re: New feature for the filesystems. What do you think ? Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 20:05:33 GMT
>Sort of like the Plan 9 interface for file (or anything else) servers.
>
>It would be neat to have something like the bind() call from Plan 9
>that would let you attach a process to a particular file. All
>filesystem calls to that file would be get directed to that process.
>--
>rajat (rajat@watson.ibm.com)
This seems to be most reasonable. The technique (of bound programs)
was used in some old (CDC's NOS)? opsys developed before the mid 70's
as we studied the mechanism in school.
The concept is pretty clean and lets the user decide whether to incur
additional overhead for a given file or set of files. Compressing
disk controllers would be the best bet as the main CPU is not used for
the work, but compressing blocks in the system could be quite time
consuming, expecially for one using, say, X11...
The binding mechanism is also quite general and would allow many more
features such as passwords for individual files, locking, etc. This could
be especially valuable in an environment where filesystems could be
created on arbitrary sets of disk blocks (files) because then one could
implement the compress-each-block-of-the-fs type of fs also.
--john
--
John McDermott 505/897-2064 H/W
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