[Cialug] a good idea for file systems?

[Nathan Smith]

A little late to the game on this one, but it sounds like iSCSI

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org
> [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Nuzum
> Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 8:57 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
> Subject: [Cialug] a good idea for file systems?
>
> 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
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