libefs and IronDoc

["Wesley Felter" <wesf cs utexas edu>]

Hello Bonobo hackers,

After reading the libefs TODO and some comments on this list, I'm inclined
to suggest that  somebody look at IronDoc (or look at it again if you've
already seen it).

<http://www.best.com/~mccusker/irondoc/irondoc.htm>

IronDoc is a persistent storage system that is designed to support
filesystem-in-a-file scenarios (among others). In particular, it:
* refcounts blobs, which should make hard links pretty easy
* uses "fences" to store blobs smaller than a block efficiently
* uses btrees to store large blobs efficiently
* provides btrees that can be used for directories and/or indexes
* is designed to support transactions for reliable crash recovery
* is schema-less, so you can store pretty much anything (want to keep a MIME
type for each file? no problem)

That was the good news. The bad news is that the most recent version (0.21)
doesn't actually have all of those features. Since I'm not affiliated with
the project, I can't estimate when they will be complete. (But read the link
below for hints.)

Mozilla may end up using IronDoc for its disk cache:
<http://x38.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=528829790>

Wesley Felter - wesf@cs.utexas.edu
"The question isn't whether smarter is better. The question is whether
better is better." -- Jonathan Shapiro