4 ms·

The Hurd does this the best in my opinion. It is really flexible and you can just install a translator on any file system node that you control. That translat

by rekado 9y ago

The Hurd does this the best in my opinion. It is really flexible and you can just install a translator on any file system node that you control. That translator could do pretty much anything: XML parsing to represent XML as a file tree, FTP listings, SSH access, etc.

Alanna99 9y ago
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krylon 9y ago
Linux and FreeBSD (and probably a couple of other systems I am too lazy to check up on right now) have FUSE, which allows a file system driver to run in user space. I think what FUSE allows one to do is similar, but one has to mount the "file system" first. There are some pretty clever drivers out there - I have seen one that took a directory tree of flac files and mounted it as a directory tree where all the flac files have been replaced by mp3 files; when you open one of the mp3 files, the driver performs the conversion transparently. There is one driver, I think, that transparently turns access to files into Google searches, so opening a file named "zebu" will give you a file of search results Google returned for that term. And I would guess there some even more ... special ones out there. But besides the trouble of mounting such a "file system" first, the OS kernel itself has no knowledge of what the driver does. It simply passes back and forth access requests and data (roughly speaking, I have never written one myself). On Windows, many functions in the Win32 API take a parameter that designates a host on which to perform the operation. So the operating system at kernel level has a notion that there are other Windows systems out there it can talk to over the network and send each other commands or data. On Unixoid systems, I sometimes miss this builtin network access which is automatically supported by all applications. OTOH, that opens a large can of worms, given the number of security issues that have come up over the years with Windows' SMB protocol or its RPC mechanism. So maybe the status quo is good. Now that I think of it, Microsoft's Powershell allows something like a translator. They are called Providers, I think. One can access the Windows registry a directory tree-like structure and add or delete values by creating or removing "files". I think it is extensible, too. I vaguely remember that it is possible to traverse the directory tree of a Windows domain.
- rekado 9y ago
  FUSE doesn't compose well, though. On the Hurd you can, for example, transparently access a node of an XML file inside a gzipped tarball on an FTP server; with FUSE you'd have to design the userspace file system adapter to support these extensions, whereas with the Hurd it's a consequence of using nodes of the virtual file system as flexible rendezvous points for stacked translators. With FUSE users are still second to admins when it comes to file systems. On the Hurd all file operations can be interposed -- it enables fine-grained virtualisation by design. (On Linux, on the other hand, user namespaces are a post-hoc hack.)

by rekado 9y ago

Alanna99 9y ago

Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do, ====http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com

krylon 9y ago

Linux and FreeBSD (and probably a couple of other systems I am too lazy to check up on right now) have FUSE, which allows a file system driver to run in user space. I think what FUSE allows one to do is similar, but one has to mount the "file system" first. There are some pretty clever drivers out there - I have seen one that took a directory tree of flac files and mounted it as a directory tree where all the flac files have been replaced by mp3 files; when you open one of the mp3 files, the driver performs the conversion transparently. There is one driver, I think, that transparently turns access to files into Google searches, so opening a file named "zebu" will give you a file of search results Google returned for that term. And I would guess there some even more ... special ones out there. But besides the trouble of mounting such a "file system" first, the OS kernel itself has no knowledge of what the driver does. It simply passes back and forth access requests and data (roughly speaking, I have never written one myself). On Windows, many functions in the Win32 API take a parameter that designates a host on which to perform the operation. So the operating system at kernel level has a notion that there are other Windows systems out there it can talk to over the network and send each other commands or data. On Unixoid systems, I sometimes miss this builtin network access which is automatically supported by all applications. OTOH, that opens a large can of worms, given the number of security issues that have come up over the years with Windows' SMB protocol or its RPC mechanism. So maybe the status quo is good. Now that I think of it, Microsoft's Powershell allows something like a translator. They are called Providers, I think. One can access the Windows registry a directory tree-like structure and add or delete values by creating or removing "files". I think it is extensible, too. I vaguely remember that it is possible to traverse the directory tree of a Windows domain.

rekado 9y ago
FUSE doesn't compose well, though. On the Hurd you can, for example, transparently access a node of an XML file inside a gzipped tarball on an FTP server; with FUSE you'd have to design the userspace file system adapter to support these extensions, whereas with the Hurd it's a consequence of using nodes of the virtual file system as flexible rendezvous points for stacked translators. With FUSE users are still second to admins when it comes to file systems. On the Hurd all file operations can be interposed -- it enables fine-grained virtualisation by design. (On Linux, on the other hand, user namespaces are a post-hoc hack.)