Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 27 Jun 1999 21:01:00 +0300 | From | Matti Aarnio <> | Subject | Re: [patch] pagecache-2.3.9-H3, bmap & ext2fs cleanup patch |
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On Sun, Jun 27, 1999 at 10:08:11AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > The best argument for having the filesystem know about devices is to have > filesystems that can "migrate" files from one device to another. It can be > done other ways too, but basically it is really nice for "intelligent" > filesystems that do (for example) dynamic load balancing or that have > multiple levels of caching.
Eee... Big blue MVS rearing its head ? Actually there are other uses for such things too, and likely more common ones.
> Basically I'm talking about hierarchical filesystems: everything looks > like one large filesystem, but the filesystem itself can dynamically move > things from a slow medium to a fast medium according to usage patterns. > Old stuff that is seldom used is on a slow disk (or disk arrays), while > stuff that is used regularly is on a fast one.
Yes, and ultimate storage medium is magnetic tape (for files). A careless egrep thru the filesystem causes massive randomish tape activity (at the robot), of course..
Still, one can do a 'find' thru the entire filesystem, and stat() will yield sensible info. ( + possible magic flag telling the file is actually offline ...)
> I'm not writing one, and I don't know of anybody _else_ writing one .... > Linus
Me neither -- not now, anyway, but e.g. SGI XFS (as I understand it) can use that facility too.
/Matti Aarnio
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