So how does one go about contributing a substantially new technology to the kernel?
Sage Weil was working on a distributed file system for Linux as part of his PhD research at University of California, Santa Cruz. This was before the advent of the buzzword “big data”, and therefore before things like Hadoop or Amazon’s S3. His research into distributed fault tolerance led him to the conclusion that the best way to manage a clustered filesystem was at the kernel layer, rather than higher up in userspace. He called his filesystem “Ceph” — a shortened version of Cephalopod — as a nod to the “highly parallel behavior of an octopus