Logical File System and Parts-of File System and JNode

I wanted to point the people working in JNode-FS to this recent PhD thesis:

http://lfs.irisa.fr/~pad

Particularly, if you look into the papers folder

http://lfs.irisa.fr/~pad/rawaccess.query/papers

There's the thesis itself (sadly in French, if you can't read French or happily in French if you're more fluent in French than in English), but there are the slides of the defense (in English) and two USENIX papers about the LFS and the PoFFS.

In a nutshell, Yoann Padioleau extended Linux through FUSE (Filesystem in USEr space) so as to allow a logical access to files. When you cd to a "directory" in LFS what you're actually doing is crafting a formula to access the underlining files, through metadata. While this requires a good deal of tinkering in Linux, I think JNode is in a much better position to incorporate this approach. The use of formulae appears normally related to access control lists in regular file systems. The beauty of LFS is that it allows a unified view of security, tagging and search. (more below)

The PoFFS is an event more intriguing idea: for certain structured files, you can actually navigate inside the file, doing a "cd" to a particular C function or a particular section in a LaTeX document.

I know the JNode effort is spreading itself quite thin at the moment, but there are interesting ideas that it could be interesting to look at at some moment.

I'm crossposting this topic in these two other existing topics that have an overlap with this:

• The Accessing of a File in Jnode File Systems
• JNode System-file Tree Structure