Linux: Files as Directories
Miklos Szeredi posted a patch to allow files to be accessed as directories, offering the example of accessing the contents of a compressed tarball as you would any other directory. He noted that this is not the only application of the patch, "others might suggest accessing streams, resource forks or extended attributes through such an interface.
However this patch only deals with the non-directory case, so directories would be excluded from that interface. But otherwise this patch doesn't limit the uses of the 'file as directory' concept in any way. It just adds the infrastructure to support these whacky beasts."
Flash is more compact, requires less power, and offers truly random access, so it's not surprising to see it being deployed in more situations.
Flash storage cannot be simply overwritten like magnetic storage; instead, a flash block must be explicitly erased and rewritten in two separate steps. The size of the "erase blocks" may not match the block size as understood by the operating system; often, the erase blocks are relatively large.
These hardware features have some interesting implications. What, for example, happens when the operating system decides to rewrite a single block within a larger flash erase block? A naive implementation would read the entire erase block, perform the erase operation, then write the data back with the new portion included. Should the system go down in the middle of this operation, however, all of the data within the erase block may be lost forever. If the operating system ignores the block lifetime issues, it is likely to cycle some erase blocks much more frequently than others, significantly shortening the overall life of the device. When one is dealing with a low-duty-cycle device, such as a USB thumb drive, it's possible to get away with ignoring the limitations that flash has. When a flash drive is the primary storage device, though, a smarter approach is called for.
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