Ok, so the generation (ephemeral) inode thing from my previous comment seems to solve our inode collision problem… because it means that ino can remain a strictly local thing, which is great, and makes a lot of sense for any kind of networked file system.
So our previous example becomes:
- root
- file1 (uuid<555>,inode_uuid<123>)
- file2 (uuid<556>,inode_uuid<123>)
- inodes
- (uuid<123>, meta...) --> XorName ---> file content
- trash
plus, we have a purely local hashmap/dictionary/index of uuid => local_inode_entry:
123 ---> (ino<5>, uuid<123>, lookup_cnt<2>)
and another that is ino => local_inode_entry:
5 ---> (ino<5>, uuid<123>, lookup_cnt<2>)
This way, we can quickly lookup by the ino to find uuid (eg for stat) or by the uuid to find the ino (eg for lookup).
It would be nicer if we could use a single index, but I don’t immediately see a good way to do that at this late hour. 