One of my goals at GUADEC was to raise the level of community debate surrounding FUSE. Neither the maintainer or even a real contributor, I have no vested interest in the code. Merely an impressed user, my mission was to foster acceptance or find a real and legitimate counterpoint. To excel, GNOME must not cater to the lowest common denominator.
In my FUSE talk, I addressed the benefits of FUSE—kernel mounts, POSIX I/O, simplicity, mmap(), performance—and the work we would need to do—we still need and want an asynchronous I/O library on top, for example. Plus a stream library. But we need and want those things, anyhow.
The reception was positive and, as a next step, some smart people plan to play and evaluate.
The Get a Load of This Guy
As a demonstration for my FUSE talk—as well as Joey's Beagle talk—I hacked together beaglefs, a filesystem that represents a live Beagle query.
I spent some time cleaning it up; I now consider it feature complete and stable. Thus, I present beaglefs 0.1.
The Lynndie England
The premise is simple: The filesystem contains a symlink for each query hit, pointing at the target file. The filesystem is updated in real-time as Beagle sends out live updates. Extended attributes on each file yield the hit metadata. The "inodes" are stored in a hash table, so most operations are quick even amid many hits. The code is quite simple and I am excited to see what others can do with beaglefs and FUSE in general.
The Oh My
The Weekly Standard had an excellent piece last week, Give Me Bandwidth, with a laissez-faire argument on the network neutrality debate.