Intermezzo FS on FreeBSD

[Eric Anderson]

Ivan Voras wrote:
> Onkar wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>          This is my first post on FreeBSD mailing list ; so sorry if I am
>> not adhering to any rules.
>>
>> My Question was :
>>                           (1) Is Intermezzo File system ported onto FreeBSD.
>> [Y/N]
> 
> Almost certainly not.
> 
>>                           (2) If (1) is N, Why it is not ported for so long
>> ? Is there any specific reason (licensing etc (but Intermezzo FS is under
>> GPL) )? [Y/N]
> 
> Nobody payed anybody to do it, and nobody needed it badly enough to do
> it themselves.
> 
>>                           (4) If (2) is N , Can I start porting it to
>> FreeBSD now ? [Y/N]
> 
> Yes! As long as you keep everything needed for the module (more
> specifically, everything under non-BSD friendly license) in a separate
> module, there wouldn't be licensing problems.
> 
> I've did some reading about Intermezzo and one of the things about it is
> that it's described as "working on top of a journaled file system". By
> its specification it seems it doesn't actually need a journal but a
> "file system operations stream". There's no general way of generating
> these records (AFAIK there is in DragonflyBSD) but maybe it would be
> enough to hook up like a nullfs mount.
> 
>>                           (5) if (4) is Y, then how to register the project
>> (i.e., "Intermezzo on FreeBSD") ?
> 
> That sounds like a good name. If you are serious about it, maybe you
> could ask for a Perforce account (if you can deal with the way it works
> :) ), a wiki account, etc.


Intermezzo would be great to have available for FreeBSD.  I can say that 
I have used nullfs in the past to snoop file system operations when used 
as a transparent layer, and it works well.  A bit more work could be 
done to extend that into a decent format usable by intermezzo, or even 
further used by something like the Apple fsevents.

Eric