i'm curious -- are there any filesystem implementations for linux that don't fit nicely into the VFS model? that don't follow the convenient file/dentry/inode/superblock standard?
I imagine there very well might be, possibly academic exercises or even very specialized virtual pseudo filesystems, but on Linux they would still have to somehow use the VFS, probably by treating directories as categories, dates, or pre-/suffixes. At the end of the day, if you're treating it as a filesystem, it's going to have to fit the VFS, because that's the only way it's going to get represented to the user.
I sure can't think of any examples though. So much of computer science is hierarchical. You could turn even XML/XHTML/TeX markup into a filesystem, and databases into filesystems. If something is just so radically non-hierarchical, it's more likely you'd be writing a special file or on-disk format for it, or possibly having a daemon you'd access through a library or a pipe, and not be using the VFS in the first place.
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