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    SubjectRe: NTFS-like streams?


    On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Mo McKinlay wrote:

    > Well...wouldn't it be possible to implement a generic 'filefs' modular
    > interface? i.e., everything for handling the pseudo-filesystem gets put
    > into a module which has an API that doesn't change very often at all (or
    > at least, is nicely backward compatible), and doesn't need to be compiled
    > at the same as the kernel itself.

    Umm... It will make you run file(1) _way_ too often. And such things
    should be restrictable to areas in the tree (at the very least). Not to
    mention the wonders of remote DoS attacks - just think of a hundred
    kiddies logging in to FTP archive and saying cd foo/bar.deb/debian...

    Having standard RPC mechanism for userland filesystems is a nice thing,
    indeed, but that's completely different story. Aforementioned Plan 9 uses
    that for almost all filesystems (OK, except the device drivers' ones,
    procfs and other internal kernel stuff). Moreover, that's the only
    internal RPC mechanism they have - doing all RPC in filesystem terms
    turned out to be possible.

    I'm not proposing to take ext2 to userland (and even less so - doing that
    via 9P or styx), but for weird_long_dead_micro_floppies_fs it would be
    ideal - such things are certainly better in userland.

    Besides, ability to have RPC with callers using plain and simple
    read()/write()/etc. is a Good Thing(tm). If we had it from the very
    beginning libc would be _way_ smaller. Having getpwent implemented as
    fscanf from /mnt/nsswitch/passwd/<lusername> and letting nscd do the
    right thing... Tempting.


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