I'd like to announce the availability of streamfs filesystem for the
linux-2.4.0-test8 kernel. Streamfs is a special purpose file system for
Linux geared towards audio/video editing and other streaming media needs.
It is special purpose in the sense that only limited number of regular
files (or tracks) are supported. However these are guaranteed to be
non-fragmented. Streamfs also tries to take advantage of the locality
of reference by interleaving the tracks together on disk. In addition
streamfs still supports a limited amount of meta information on the
partition such as directories and symlinks.
Tracks are stored on disk by interleaving them together. Below is
an example of the on-disk layout in the case where there are four
tracks on the filesystem with a track fragment size of one block.
0 4 8 12 16 20
---+---+---+---+---+---
AAA|BBB|CCC|DDD|AAA|...
---+---+---+---+---+---
This filesystem was mostly done to get familiar with VFS and filesystems in
general. The goal was to make a very simple filesystem but yet it should
be useful. The former I think succeeded well, the whole code is just
2000 lines when counted with wc.
Having tested and benchmark quite a lot during the last week I can't say I'm
sure about its usefulness. There seems to be a definite advantage over ext2
in hdrbench [1] tests but it isn't certain that this advantage outweighs
the extra complexity and the limitations of which audio-dev folks expressed
their concern. Streamfs has been a good learning experience and as such
has already served its purpose for me so I think I'll let the user feedback
to decide whether further effort is warranted.
More information and download:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/Aki.Laukkanen/streamfs.html
References:
[1] http://www.linuxdj.com/hdrbench/
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