Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives

David Masover
2004-09-03T00:17:10Z

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Spam wrote:
[...]
| I doubt that something like file streams and meta-data can
| successfully be implemented purely in user-space and get the same
| support (ie be used by many programs) if this change doesn't come
| from the kernel. I just do not see it happen.

The issue is not "many programs". The issue is "all programs".

Even if the political issues were solved -- even if Linus said to us all
"Thou shalt use this library or suffer my wrath!" -- it'd have to be
everywhere. Bash. Perl. Make. Gcc. Vim.

And btw, if it was political, you'd get no sympathy here. ("Oh no,
everyone's using their own game engine! We need to put the doom3 engine
in the kernel, now!") No, _people_ solve political problems. Kernels
don't.

Kernel support automatically adds support for a lot of features without
patching a thing.

There should be an interface in the filesystem. And for certain things,
uservfs will be incredibly slower than reiser4 as that interface.
(Remember Linus' point about TUX and Apache.)

I'll say this again: most of it -- all but the bare interface stuff --
should be in userspace. In fact, let's all add this to our signature so
no one brings it up again. ("Oh no, they want to put tar support in the
kernel!" no, we don't.)
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