On Apr 03, 2002 17:16 +0200, Pieter De Wit wrote: > I am looking to extend/create a file system that span networks/device of any > kind, shape and manner :) Check out http://www.insync.za.net/openufs/ (also > on http://openufs.sourceforge.net - but I am not here to adv. the site !) First note - UFS is a really bad name for this project, because this is commonly used for "Unix File System", which is used by Sun, HP, BSD, etc as their primary filesystem. Linux even has a driver for this (see fs/ufs). > I would like to know, where can I find what EXT3 will write to the disk, > how it works etc. > > Surely EXT3 will write something like this : > > Block 0 - (1024 bytes) {DATA} > Block 1 - (1024 bytes) {FAT type block} This data is described in many places on the net (a good starting point would be Ted's http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ site, which has links to such documentation). The ext3 filesystem has exactly the same on-disk layout as ext2 does. It looks like you have a background with MSDOS/FAT filesystems? > Hope this makes sense..... Yes, this is actually a very interesting project. In fact, I'm part of a team working on a distributed ext3 implementation right now (see http://www.lustre.org/ for details). Not to be overly negative, but it would seem that if you do not even know how ext3 stores its data on disk, it would seem a very difficult challenge to write a distributed ext3 implementation. If you are really interested in working on something like this, I'd consider downloading the Lustre code and seeing how it works first. We have "Lustre Lite" partly working already, which distributes metadata and data storage across servers, along with the beginnings of a lock manager. If you are still interested, you may consider contributing to Lustre - it is fully Open Source (GPL) software. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto, \ would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?" http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ -- Dogbert
