> The above said, being faster is only a small part of the charm of the new
> dcache: the much more important issue is that the way the new dcache is
> laid out, it allows us to do things that used to be impossible. Only one
> of these is the reverse mapping from inodes to names, that UNIX
> traditionally cannot do (getting the current working directory name is a
> special case of this, but the dcache is much more general than just that).
Neat-o.. Now will I be able to NFS export SMB mounted FSes??
> The original reason for the dcache was for Thomas Schoebel to do on-line
> mirroring of filesystems which required a generalized way of getting the
> file names from the inode. That has actually been disabled in the newer
> test-kernels, but that's not because it's a bad feature: I just wanted to
> make sure that I had the basics working really correctly before the new
> extra features are added back in.
>
Hmm, has anyone done any work on giving linux it's own TDCFS?
(Transparent Distributed Cached Filesystem).. I started working on an
implementition for Novell Netware but, my head started to smoke, and I
havn't found a skull sized heatsink & fan yet.... The reason I was working
on the Novell thing was because a company I've been working with needs
that sorta thing for their wan.. Right now it's either local or remote
(and thus slow), so keeping data centrilized is hard.. Novell has
'replication services' but thats just the same as a cron job that copies
files.. It would be neat to see such a feature in linux..