> This already exists -- it is called an NFS[*] server.
Gosh, really? "NFS", you say? I've never heard of it!
Yes, OF COURSE the people discussing this know of the existence of
standard networked filesystems. In fact, if you'd bothered to read the
start of the thread, you'd have seen that it started with a complaint
about current filesystems. The problem, you see, isn't that people
don't know of the wondrous technology called "fileservers", it's that
they don't necessarily think it's good enough for everything you might
want to do.
There are many reasons why you'd want to use something other than a
standard PC with a bunch of disks attached to serve files; instead of
detailing them, I'll just suggest that you read one of the many papers
that have been written on intelligent storage and network-attached
disks.
Some references for information on network-attached storage and
intelligent disks:
http://www.nsic.org/nasd.html
http://www.pdl.cs.cmu.edu/NASD/
http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/Xfs/xfs.html
http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/Ed_Lee/Petal/petal.html
http://www.isi.edu/div7/netstation/
--nat
-- nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs magus@cs.cmu.edu -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/ there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/