Re: (reiserfs) Re: Implementing Meta File information in Linux (and a note at the

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
4 Sep 1998 04:24:12 GMT

Followup to: <199809031247.WAA16479@vindaloo.atnf.CSIRO.AU>
By author: Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.csiro.au>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> > > Of course, if you have large metadata, then you're better off making
> > > each stream as a file in a directory and letting the FS do the work.
> > > The FS code already has one bunch of code to implement growing streams
> > > (files), I think we'd want to leverage that instead of implementing
> > > yet another level of what is effectively file/directory management
> > > inside the FS.
>
> To clarify: I see two situations. The first is where you have a small
> number of secondary streams of small size which don't grow much. Here
> a single file can suffice.
> The second case is where these assumptions break down, and in that
> case I think each stream belongs in a file. A userspace API is written
> to allow you to deal with the dataset as a single object. For
> consistency, even where the above assumptions hold, it's probably
> better to use one file per stream.
> I see directories being excellent placeholders for grouping
> metadata. With reiserFS, this userspace implementation will be very
> fast, so it's the logical way to go, IMO.
>

For the small data objects (i.e. "resources"), it seems that using a
standard database library like gdbm or db is appropriate.

-hpa

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