Bazil stands on the shoulders of some giants, and was inspired by shoulders of other giants. Or something like that.
FUSE is a protocol between the kernel and a userspace process, letting the userspace serve file system requests coming from the kernel.
The kernelspace implementation has very partial documentation, but the public API and the implementation are the best guides because they are the only thing that matters in the end.
Bazil does not use the original C library at
fuse.sourceforge.net. Instead, we
have an independent implementation of the protocol, in Go:
bazil.org/fuse.
OSXFUSE is the FUSE kernel side ported to Apple's OS X.
Bazil's use of a CAS is similar to how Plan 9‘s Fossil archived nightly snapshots to Venti.
Bazil uses the CAS a lot more aggressively, pushing content to it as soon as reasonable, instead of as part of a nightly dump.
Bazil has multiple peers independently accessing the CAS data, instead of having a singular service maintaining the state of the filesystem.
Bazil will (at some point) perform garbage collection, instead of relying on any “640kB should be enough for everyone” mentality.
Tra is a project by Russ Cox that was mostly
active 2002-2004. You can think of it as a stateful two-way rsync,
with version vectors to quickly decide which subdirectories and files
need to be synchronized.
Bazil's synchronization logic is inspired by the academic paper describing Tra, Optimistic Replication Using Vector Time Pairs (slides: 1, 2).
In the interests of software archeology, we have a Git mirror of the original CVS repository at https://github.com/bazil/tra
Blake2 is a fast, cryptographically secure, and flexible hash. It can be personalized, keyed, and has no fixed output length.
Every single use of Blake2 in Bazil is personalized; you can't build a “rainbow table” of generic Blake2 results and attack Bazil with that, the table would have to be specific to Bazil.
Where it makes sense, the hash is keyed with a nonce-equivalent, for example some unique bytes that are going to be always known at the time the hash is computed. This makes even the above Bazil-specific rainbow table worthless.
The output lengths are generally chosen to be overly large, for extra margin of safety and robustness in future – yet the lengths are just a matter of tuning. For example, the size of the CAS key is a single constant, allowing easy experimentation on whether there is a performance difference (there doesn't seem to be).
And after all this, Blake2 is fast.
NaCl is a delightfully simple & fast crypto library. Bazil uses the Go reimplementation of it.
Bolt is a key/value store, with an emphasis at very fast reads. Its API is a pleasure to use.