BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2001 > May
The Future Of The File System
By Jon Udell
May 31, 2001
(The Future Of The File System
: Page 1 of 3 )
In a column a few weeks back on document engineering, I cited some newsgroup discussions about granular addressing and naming of document elements. The thread, which has since continued, keeps coming back to the central issue of namespace management:
Rich Kilmer:
The person who has done a lot of work in namespace management is Hans Reiser (http://www.namesys.com). He is the author of the ReiserFS filesystem for Linux. His paper (http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html) goes into good detail on namespace issues -- really good detail!
Rich co-founded Roku Technologies, a company that rode the recent P2P wave with a product that made the existing e-mail software on always-connected desktop PCs available for remote access. In a recent Forbes article, Ann Winblad said, "Start-ups such as Roku and Groove Networks have emerged to deliver frameworks to build other new P2P applications. With Roku's products, I can use my wireless device to access the files on my desktop (or yours) from anywhere." Despite excellent press, and some impressive bundling deals, Roku is now gone, another victim of the current downdraft.
As Rich contemplates his next move, he's been enriching our newsgroup with some of the fruits of his six years of research and development at Roku. I was particularly intrigued by his reference to Hans Reiser's whitepaper. Though I've been aware of the ReiserFS, I had mentally categorized it as "a high-performance journaling filesystem for Linux." It was a revelation to discover that, for Reiser, this technology is just a means to an end -- namely, turning the filesystem into the kind of object database that can help us model the real-world activities we engage in when we create, store, exchange, and search for information.
BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2001 > May
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