VFS

Tuesday, September 9th, 2003

I’ve been looking around for a good user-land VFS (virtual file system) library to include in my file manager Nimf. So far no luck. It seems every VFS library out there sucks. So far, I’ve looked at Gnome VFS which is unusable since it’s so annoyingly slow. Gnome-commander uses it, and it takes that file manager almost half a minute to load a directory with 290 files. Compared to Nimf, which loads it in about 1.5 seconds, that’s pretty slow. Having a bloated VFS in Nimf would be nice, but I’m not going to compromise any speed to it’s cause. That’s the whole reason I started Nimf in the first place and why I don’t want any bindings with Gnome. Other VFS libraries I’ve looked at include Midnight Commander’s one which seemed not to meet my demands. AVFS, which supports lots of stuff looks a bit obscure and isn’t really a library I think.

I’m not even really sure I want a user-land VFS library anyway. The old unix philosophy goes “Everything is a file” and a VFS library kind of contradicts that. What I’d personally like is a kernel module which allows you to mount Zip files and the likes. I’ve seen them around, and the only problem with that is that it might make Nimf less user-friendly.

I’ll do some more research into it and probably set up a VFS-comparison page where I’ll discuss the results. In the meantime any tips would be appreciated.

In other news: Tommorow me and my girlfriend Merel will have been together for precisely 1.75 years, which will be, like every other 15th of the month, no big deal at all.