[Linux-aus] Grant Application: OLS speaker travel

[Ben Martin]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 21:18 +1100, James Purser wrote:
> Hi Ben,
> 
> Basically what I'm looking for is the benefit to the community. While
> your attendance at OLS would of no doubt be enourmous benfit to
> yourself, we need to show that the benefit could be spread to the wider
> community of Linux Australia members.

An excellent question :) </stalling-for-time>

I guess I'm looking at the OLS thing not so much from the angle of me
presenting what I'm doing at a conference but in the light of talking to
folks about what interesting stuff Linux filesystems of any project can
be doing in the future, be them ferris, gvfs, kio, fuse, kernel based or
whatever. My talk will be ultra handy for trying to find the other
filesystem addicts in the crowds :]

It's hard to argue for direct positive effects for the Linux Australia
members. The case I put forward is for knock on effects from projects
which might be spawned. (by me or others). These effects are harder to
make a case for as they would not be a direct cause-effect relation and
would not effect only the Linux Australia community but be out there for
all "freedom lovers".

Taking the third person perspective one could ask that if my being there
was that important to the community then why am I struggling to do that.
Perhaps some would say that the acceptance level I have achieved at OLS
is diminutive and a kind way of saying "no thanks". The counterpoint
would be that advocating filesystems as outside of the ext2-4, xfs, et
al. or nfs/smb for network shares leaves one on shaky ground. It has
been mentioned by OLS that everyone who had the acceptance level I have
at last years event was speaking at the event. In this light it would
seem that the acceptance I have is more a reflection of the project I
have being outside normal filesystem talk parameters and would not be an
issue if I was physically stationed in north America.

As a little history of libferris talks:
2002 Brisbane LCA - Work in Progress talk
2005 Linux Kongress - Accepted 45 minute talk
2007 OLS - OK pending finding airfare to get there.

I don't have a vid cam but am happy to go with Colin Charles idea if its
ok with LA and the OLS organizers don't take issue with me sitting a
camera on my fold out table at talks ;) The flip side is that being a
one man amateur filmer  I obviously can't bring back anything like the
sort of quality that the LCA crew did. Well, 

I do have access to a Canon G7, but using it with a bunch of 4gb sdcards
as a video camera might not be what folks are seeking. Though this route
does negate the whole equipment loan issue. 


...and now for some more technical stuff...

From my understanding OLS has many kernel folks attending, which would
be a chance to talk about how to implement stuff like filesystem
overlays for implementing load time precaching to speed up application
launch with the ability of the precache mechanics going away after load.
Since I've not wandered much on the kernel side of the syscall line OLS
would be a great chance to advocate such project ideas over a few
bribes^W beers. 

Specifically for the above idea I'd love to put in place a FUSE
filesystem like my past ones [1,2,3] which would use for example a db4
precache which could be loaded sequentially of disk with minimal seeking
and offer all the precached files to the application as though they were
really from all over the disk. The trouble is that the fuse filesystem
needs to be able to negotiate with the kernel and gradually hand back
control of some open fd's to kernel space in preperation of going away
itself and the application being unaware of all this. But it will save a
bucket load of seeks at app startup time.

Side note: Anyone with interest in the above, feel free to email me :)

These things being free and open source software also have no time frame
to arrive or "be done". Which also makes saying that any of this has a
solid tangible "great benefit" for LA members.

[1] http://freshmeat.net/projects/ferrisfuse/
[2] http://freshmeat.net/projects/fuselagefs/
[3] http://freshmeat.net/projects/petardfs/

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