Re: srfs - a new file system.

[Eric Sandall <eric@sandall.us>]

Quoting Nir Tzachar <tzachar@cs.bgu.ac.il>:
> hello all.
> 
> We're proud to announce the availability of a _proof of concept_ file
> system, called srfs. ( http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~srfs/ ).
> a quick overview: [from the home page]
> srfs is a global file system designed to be distributed geographicly over
> multiple locations and provide a consistent, high available and durable
> infrastructure for information.
> 
> Started as a research project into file systems and self-stabilization in
> Ben Gurion University of the Negev Department of Computer Science, the
> project aims to integrate self-stabilization methods and algorithms into
> the file (and operation) systems to provide a system with a desired
> behavior in the presence of transient faults.
> 
> Based on layered self-stabilizing algorithms, provide a tree replication
> structure based on auto-discovery of servers using local and global IP
> multicasting. The tree structure is providing the command and timing
> infrastructure required for a distributed file system.
> 
> The project is basically divided into two components:
> 1) a kernel module, which provides the low level functionality, and
>    disk management.
> 2) a user space caching daemon, which provide the stabilization and
>    replication properties of the file system.
> these two components communicate via a character device.
> 
> more info on the system architecture can be find on the web page, and
> here: http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~tzachar/srfs.pdf
> 
> We hope some will find this interesting enough to take for a test drive,
> and wont mind the latencies ( currently, the caching daemon is a bit slow.
> hopefully, we will improve it in the future. )
> anyway, please keep in mind this is a very early version that only works,
> and keeps the stabilization properties. no posix compliance whatsoever...
> 
> the code contains several hacks and design flaws that we're aware of,
> and probably many that we're not... so please be gentle ;)
> 
> if someone found this interesting, please contact us with ur insights.
> cheers,
> the srfs team.
> 
> p.s I would like to thank all members of this mailing list (fsdevel), for
> ur continual help with problems we encountered during the development.
> thanks guys (and girls???).
> 
> ========================================================================
> nir.

This sounds fairly similar to Coda[0], which is already in development and use.

-sandalle

[0] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/

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Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric@sandall.us                  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/  #196285  |  http://www.shock.wsu.edu/

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