[TUHS] Quick Question: Early Filesystems and Name/Metadata Separation?

[Noel Chiappa via TUHS]

    > From: Dan Cross

    > I wondered if perhaps Multics had the concept

You have no idea of the depth of the tarpit you just stepped into! Making it
even deeper, Multics has two quite different generations of file systems;
read about the second one (reasons why, etc) here:

   https://www.multicians.org/nss.html

File metadata was kept in the directory in the first; in the second, much
metadata _was_ moved to a thing called a 'Volume Table of Contents' (VTOC),
which is sort of like the ilist (the above says "[w]e were aware of the Unix
file system design, where there was a similar split between naming data in
directories and physical data in the inode"). However, even in the New
Storage System, _some_ metadata (ACLs, etc) remained in the directories, see:

  https://www.multicians.org/mtbs/MTB-220.pdf

Just to increase the complexity, in both systems, in addition to the
segment's primary name (sort of a 'hard link'), and logical ('soft') links,
segments could have additional secondary names (much used for short names for
commands - the familiar ls, cp, mv, etc were all short names), kept in the
same directory as the primary name:

  https://multicians.org/mga.html#additionalnames

(Please excuse Bernie.) Are we having fun yet? :-)


    > it appears that the Berkeley Timesharing System for the SDS-930 may
    > have had something like hard links

I was wondering if BTSS (on which, of course, Ken worked) had such, but was
too lazy to look. Thanks!


    > From: George Michaelson

    > Is the return of a stat() call from the directory block not file
    > "metadata"?

stat() mostly return information from the inode.

	Noel