From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Hans Reiser Subject: Re: [PATCH] reiserfs: fix handling of device names with /'s in them Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2006 18:21:29 -0700 Message-ID: <44BAE619.9010307@namesys.com> References: <6xQ4C-6NB-43@gated-at.bofh.it> <6xQea-6ZX-13@gated-at.bofh.it> <44B7D97B.20708@suse.com> <44B9E6D5.2040704@namesys.com> <44BA61A2.5090404@suse.com> <44BA8214.7040005@namesys.com> <44BABB14.6070906@suse.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com In-Reply-To: <44BABB14.6070906@suse.com> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Jeff Mahoney Cc: 7eggert@gmx.de, Eric Dumazet , ReiserFS List , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Andrew Morton Jeff Mahoney wrote: > Hans Reiser wrote: > > > Hans, we're all in agreement that we'd prefer drivers not use names with > slashes in them, there is nothing wrong with using names that have slashes. The thing that is wrong is somehow needing to translate them into names with "!"'s. > and it would be nice to correct drivers currently using > them. The problem is that when you change the name of a device, that's a > userspace visible change. So don't. Why would user space care how you parse it and whether the driver or reiserfs does it? > Scripts that currently expect, say, > /proc/partitions to contain cciss/ will break between kernel > versions. Sysfs wants to use the device name as a pathname component, > and as such translates the / to a !, the same as this patch proposes. > > Reiserfs gets involved because it expects that name to be usable as a > file system pathname component when it is not intended to be one without > translating slashes into another character. The difference is that > block device names are allowed to have slashes in them, while normal > file system names are not. We should distinguish here between names and name components. > The fact is that device driver names, when in > /dev can use separate components, like /dev/cciss/0, but when used in > the manner reiserfs wants them to be used, they can't. Also, I'm not > talking about name spaces like struct namespace, I mean that the group > of names that block device drivers use have different constraints than > the group of names that are allowable as file names. > > The fact is that this change is required for users deploying devices > that use slashes in their names to see the proc data for a reiserfs file > system. You can point the finger all you want at the block drivers in > the mean time, but it's still a reiserfs problem. I still do not grok why you need to change / to !. Something is wrong. Reiserfs is being asked to do something that somebody else should be doing. Hans