[OpenAFS-devel] Fileserver as Masters Thesis

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:31:54 +0200, Frank Bagehorn <FBA@zurich.ibm.com> said:

> How about two more proposals:
> - I don't know how it would really perform, but you could create a 
> fileserver that uses an underlying database.
> - Or you create a virtual layer for the existing fileservers, so that you 
> would have a well-defined interface to whatever lies below. (NAMEI or 
> INODE or DB or whatever comes to peoples mind.)

I recommended (in private mail) using one of the existing "inode
filesystem" implementations (effectively *fs without the naming layer)
and extended attributes to create a more portable implementation of an
inode fileserver.  On systems which don't have an inode filesystem,
you could fake it using getfh() and fhopen() with an index stored in a
database.  (The idea here, in both cases, is to avoid the overhead
associated with the naming layer in the filesystem.)

-GAWollman