Re: gnome

[Manish Vachharajani <mvachhar vger rutgers edu>]

On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, George wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 09, 1998 at 02:32:32PM -0500, Manish Vachharajani wrote:
> > > I doubt it's bad from an academic point of view ... the vfs is too app
> > > specific ... what it allows you to do is to go to a tar archive without
> > > mounting it ... same with ftp .... ftp and tar SHOULD NOT be in the
> > > kernel ... if one wants kernel support one uses nfs or coda or whatnot
> > > ... however .. remember that if the kernel supports it .. only root
> > > can mount any fs ... however any user can use a userlevel vfs ...
> > 
> > Well, not if linux had process specific mount's :)  I was thinking about
> > implementing this a while back, then the inode code got rewritten and so I
> > decided to forget about it.  There are issues with this of course, but I
> > think it can be done without breaking UNIX semantics or violating
> > security.
> 
> unless you have some reason for very high performance ... this can
> be done more flexibly in the libc or an extra lib such as the vfs ...
> I definately don't want my kernel to include all the archivers and a bunch
> of client programs such as ftp (or say even http) ... I think this is
> better served below the kernel anyway (not to mention you get portability
> as well)

Actually, at the time(about 1 year ago), I was interested in implementing
the 9p/ip protocol and the 9fs or whatever Lucent calls the plan 9 network
filesystem.  I certainly wouldn't suggest putting an ftp/http client plus,
tar, zip, arj, lha, etc. into the kernel, it is totally inappropriate.  I
should have been more clear about the intent of process specific mounts,
sorry:(
 
> if an fs is run as a user process under a userid .. it's far far far more
> secure then a kernel module ...

There are deadlock issues here though, if you are talking about userfs.  I
think that libvfs is a good idea, but it doesn't replace the usefulness of
process specific mounts, that's all.  Sorry for the confusion.


Manish Vachharajani               Some Haiku: A crash reduces
<mvachhar@vger.rutgers.edu>                   your expensive computer
                                              to a simple stone - Unknown