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Synthetic file system
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Synthetic file system
In computer science, a synthetic file system or a pseudo file system is a hierarchical interface to non-file objects that appear as if they were regular files in the tree of a disk-based or long-term-storage file system. These non-file objects may be accessed with the same system calls or utility programs as regular files and directories. The common term for both regular files and the non-file objects is node.
The benefit of synthetic file systems is that well-known file system semantics can be reused for a universal and easily implementable approach to interprocess communication. Clients can use such a file system to perform simple file operations on its nodes and do not have to implement complex message encoding and passing methods and other aspects of protocol engineering. For most operations, common file utilities can be used, so even scripting is quite easy.
This is commonly known as everything is a file and is generally regarded to have originated from Unix.
In the Unix-world, there is commonly a special filesystem mounted at /proc. This filesystem is implemented within the kernel and publishes information about processes. For each process, there is a directory (named by the process ID), containing detailed information about the process: status, open files, memory maps, mounts, etc.
/proc first appeared in Unix 8th Edition, and its functionality was greatly expanded in Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
The /sys filesystem on Linux complements /proc, by providing a lot of (non-process related) detailed information about the in-kernel status to userspace. More traditional Unix systems locate this information in sysctl calls.
ObexFS is a FUSE-based filesystem that provides access to OBEX objects via a filesystem. Applications can work on remote objects via the OBEX protocol as if they were simply (local) files.
On the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system family, the concept of 9P synthetic filesystem is used as a generic IPC method. Contrary to most other operating systems, Plan 9's design is heavily distributed: while in other OS worlds, there are many (and often large) libraries and frameworks for common things, Plan 9 encapsulates them into fileservers. The most important benefit is that applications can be much simpler and that services run network and platform agnostic - they can reside on virtually any host and platform in the network, and virtually any kind of network, as long the fileserver can be mounted by the application.
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Synthetic file system AI simulator
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Synthetic file system
In computer science, a synthetic file system or a pseudo file system is a hierarchical interface to non-file objects that appear as if they were regular files in the tree of a disk-based or long-term-storage file system. These non-file objects may be accessed with the same system calls or utility programs as regular files and directories. The common term for both regular files and the non-file objects is node.
The benefit of synthetic file systems is that well-known file system semantics can be reused for a universal and easily implementable approach to interprocess communication. Clients can use such a file system to perform simple file operations on its nodes and do not have to implement complex message encoding and passing methods and other aspects of protocol engineering. For most operations, common file utilities can be used, so even scripting is quite easy.
This is commonly known as everything is a file and is generally regarded to have originated from Unix.
In the Unix-world, there is commonly a special filesystem mounted at /proc. This filesystem is implemented within the kernel and publishes information about processes. For each process, there is a directory (named by the process ID), containing detailed information about the process: status, open files, memory maps, mounts, etc.
/proc first appeared in Unix 8th Edition, and its functionality was greatly expanded in Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
The /sys filesystem on Linux complements /proc, by providing a lot of (non-process related) detailed information about the in-kernel status to userspace. More traditional Unix systems locate this information in sysctl calls.
ObexFS is a FUSE-based filesystem that provides access to OBEX objects via a filesystem. Applications can work on remote objects via the OBEX protocol as if they were simply (local) files.
On the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system family, the concept of 9P synthetic filesystem is used as a generic IPC method. Contrary to most other operating systems, Plan 9's design is heavily distributed: while in other OS worlds, there are many (and often large) libraries and frameworks for common things, Plan 9 encapsulates them into fileservers. The most important benefit is that applications can be much simpler and that services run network and platform agnostic - they can reside on virtually any host and platform in the network, and virtually any kind of network, as long the fileserver can be mounted by the application.