Unix Programming - Problems in the Design of Unix - File Systems Might Be Considered Harmful
File Systems Might Be Considered Harmful
Was having a file system at all the wrong thing? Since the late
1970s there has been an intriguing history of research into persistent
object stores and operating systems that don't have a shared global
file system at all, but rather treat disk storage as a huge swap area
and do everything through virtualized object pointers.
Modern efforts in this line (such as
EROS[160]) hint that such designs can offer large benefits including
both provable conformance to a security policy and higher
performance. It must be noted, however, that if this is a failure of Unix,
it is equally a failure of all of its competitors; no major
production operating system has yet followed EROS's
lead.[161]
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