[Cialug] a good idea for file systems?

[Matthew Nuzum]

OK, here I am backing up my hard drive to an ext hdd. It's pretty
fast. As a matter of fact, in one way its faster than my laptop's
built in hdd because with my laptop, when I do a heavy i/o task like
du -sh in my home directory my laptop is practically unusable. Total
throughput may be a bit slower but at least I'm able to still use my
laptop like normal.

Anyway, here's my grand idea...

Imagine a device that appears to be a USB or Firewire hdd but really
is kind of a NAS that is aware of the filesystem and the files on it.
And because it has its own host processor and ram and because it is
aware of the filesystem and not just the blocks, it can behave
intelligently.

At the simple level, like MySQL caches select count(*) from table; the
file system would cache things like du -sh and file properties. But
more than that, as you get to the advanced level, it has its own built
in thing like trackerd or beagle where it can return the results of
searches extremely fast.

In a sense, it would be like having a networked file server attached
directly to your PC through a high speed interface and you don't have
to share the bandwidth with anyone, but unlike the NAS you don't have
to worry about things like locking problems or a loss of features
because the nas was designed to be used from different operating
systems.

The AMD32 cpu/dsp thingy runs Linux and has a usb slave port on it.
You can hook an SD card to it, plug it into your PC (any OS) and run a
program that makes the host computer see the device as a USB mass
storage controller. Maybe the protocol could be extended so that the
embedded linux device runs trackerd and a smart enough host OS could
detect its presence and query the linux device for details rather than
working on the raw fs. If the device is not smart enough and simply
uses the plain USB mass storage driver it still works, you just don't
get the extra features.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode