Levanta is pleased to present on the topic of Linux Virtual File Systems at the upcoming Kernel-Panic Linux User Group meeting on May 11, 2006. The presenter for this meeting will be Adam Fineberg, VP Engineering, Levanta Corp. http://www.levanta.com

Bio: Adam has over 20 years of experience at startups and established companies and has held senior management positions at Abeona Networks and Narus, Inc. Before entering the startup world, Adam was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Labs, working with the Human Language Technology Group, and Senior Research Scientist and Manager of Strategic Research at Motorola Lexicus Language Labs as well as a Senior Scientist at the Apple Advanced Technology Group.

Adam holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and a Masters and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, all from Rutgers University. Adam is the author of 6 granted patents in the areas of signal processing and pattern recognition.

Topic: Linux Virtual File System - Levanta's MapFS Open Source Project

Topic Abstract:

MapFS is an open source project by Levanta that implements a Linux virtual filesystem, and utilizes lookup redirection and copy-on-write functionality to allow component filesystems (or portions of them) to be combined into a single virtual filesystem with file level granularity.

This allows for a completely writable filesystem even if some of the component filesystems are read-only. This functionality significantly eases data sharing between multiple machines connected to a shared storage medium (SAN/NAS/Mainframe DASD) as data can be optimally shared between all of the machines in a way which is completely transparent to the applications running on them.

As a Linux kernel-loadable module, MapFS has been developed under the GPL since its incarnation in early 2004. MapFS is now being made widely available to the Open Source community via SourceForge. It is written in C, uses the standard Linux kernel VFS and loadable module interfaces for defining new filesystem types to the kernel, and supports (at least) kernel versions 2.4.7 to 2.6.15.