Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 06 Jan 2004 14:20:57 -0800 | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: [autofs] [RFC] Towards a Modern Autofs |
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Tim Hockin wrote: > On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 02:06:34PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > >>>Can you maybe share some details? I think this deign moves MORE state to >>>userspace (expiry aside). The "state" in kernel is really mostly sent back >>>to userspace. No more passing pipes into the kernel (state) or tracking the >>>pgid of the daemon (state). >> >>If you want to fire up a new daemon, all that state that was supposed to >>be kept in userspace has to be reconstructed. That means the kernel has >>to have all that information; this would include stuff like what kind of >>umount policy you want for each key entry (the current daemon doesn't do >>that because it doesn't have the proper state.) > > I'm not really sure what you're saying., here. I'm sorry. Not trying to be > thick, just not understanding. > > What umount policy? What state is supposed to be kept in userspace that isn't? >
The current autofs daemon, for example, does not handle different procedures on umount. This is particularly important when you have mount trees.
> >>>The daemon as it stands does NOT handle namespaces, does NOT handle expiry >>>well, and is a pretty sad copy of an old design. >> >>First of all, I'll be blunt: namespaces currently provide zero benefit >>in Linux, and virtually noone uses them. I have discussed this with >>Linus in the past, and neither one of us see namespaces as being worth > > Let's get rid of them, then. Make life that much easier. >
That's what the Linux community is doing, de facto. The Linux userspace simply is not set up to handle namespaces, and the autofs daemon is no exception. Consider such a simple thing as /etc/mtab - /proc/mounts which is necessary for most of the mount(8) functionality to work. It doesn't support namespaces and really cannot be made to.
namespace support in Linux is at the best a far-off future goal. It is one thing to put in infrastructure, especially since it has some other nice benefits; it's another thing to revamp all of userspace to use it; it's nowhere close and autofs is no exception.
-hpa
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