🚀 go-pugleaf

Archive-name: auto/comp.os.linux/Inheriting-File-System-IFS-experimental-release

[ I've posted this to the linux-activists mailing list yesterday, but
  because the mailing list seems to out of order at the moment, I'm
  posting it on comp.os.linux now. Please understand that this is not
  an ordinary release but rather something highly experimental that
  may not work as intended and may be changed heavily (or completely
  disappear) in the future. ]

A pre-alpha experimental version of IFS is available for anon. FTP
on rudolf.ethz.ch as /incoming/ifs.0.tar.Z

IFS implements a copy-on-write file system (similar to Sun's TFS)
with the additional capability to mount "packs" of more than two
directories. There's no Plan 9-style per-user FS space, sorry.

IFS is relative to the 0.98pl6 kernel but it should be easy to use
it with 0.98pl5 too. I haven't looked at earlier versions, so they
might or might not work.

This release has some major restrictions. Among them:
  - it has received very little testing yet, so be prepared that it
    might do something nasty to your system if you use it.
  - things like mkdir/rmdir, links, etc. are missing.
  - you can't run executables from it because bmap isn't supported.

In its current state it isn't intended to do something usable for
any real purpose but rather to illustrate the concept and to show
one possible way to implement the "overmounting" mechanism.

More information (and a lot more warnings :-) can be found in the
README.

- Werner
-- 
   _________________________________________________________________________
  / Werner Almesberger, ETH Zuerich, CH      almesber@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch /
 / IFW A44  Tel. +41 1 254 7213                 almesberger@rzvax.ethz.ch /
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