[hlandau]

>and the consequences and side effects of calling write are so diverse (from flipping bits on a harddrive to triggering arbitrary code execution) that it is all but guaranteed that something will go horribly wrong.

This is why I suggest we really need the ability to dynamically add new verbs. POSIX has one write() but in terms of semantics it's really a whole family of verbs as one overloaded method.

>The file system itself needs to know about the new type of object that it is going to represent, rather than simply acting as an index of paths to all objects.

What I had in mind was that a given filesystem driver (e.g. a userspace FUSE process) would provide object types it supports. So for example, a "printer FS" process, printerfsd, would provide printer objects under e.g. /printer/. But the vfs - the layer that does prefix matching on mount()ed filesystems wouldn't need to know about new object types, as it's just a dispatcher.

One shortcoming of this is that you can't mv /printer/foo to another filesystem. That's also a shortcoming of e.g. today's /proc or /sys, but there still seems to be enough that's worthwhile about this approach.