Sam Moffatt

MDFS was my major project in my undergradaute degree, part of Software Portfolio Project A and Project B. MDFS, or metadata file system, is a prototype 'Metadata filesystem' based on a similar concept to Microsoft's WinFS. MDFS was developed utilising PostgreSQL and FUSE to provide a virtual filesystem on top of an existing base filesystem and supports regular filesystem operations as well as extended attribute operations. One of the design goals of MDFS is to build a schema based filesystem including object hierarchies and clearly defined and typed metadata for fields of object classes. The normal extended attribute filesystem operations hook into the database and actual alter the database. The system is not fully complete but is mostly functional when utilising command line environments. Some graphical environments (Mac OS X Finder) have issues copying data onto the filesystem and at present the filesystem is not concurrent meaning it can only run in a single thread. In testing, video data has successfully streamed off the disk into VLC so individual throughput is sufficient. MDFS is developed in C and utilises SQL. Please see http://mdfs.pasamio.com