Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives (was: silent semantic changes with reiser4)

Spam
2004-09-02T19:50:31Z

> On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Alan Cox wrote:
>>
>> On Mer, 2004-09-01 at 21:50, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> > and quite frankly, I think you can do the above pretty much totally in
>> > user space with a small library and a daemon (in fact, ignoring security
>> > issues you probably don't even need the daemon). And if you can prototype
>> > it like that, and people actually find it useful, I suspect kernel support
>> > for better performance might be possible.
>>
>> Gnome already supports this in the gnome-vfs2 layer. "MC" has supported
>> it since the late 1990's.

> And nobody has asked for kernel support that I know of.

Actually. Doesn't matter if it is in kernel or not for the users as
long as it works.

The problem is that I do not see either Gnome or KDE to ever get
along to form one standard that everyone will use. Their libraries
are huge and memory hogging which so many Linux users just do not
like. What if a user doesn't want KDE or Gnome? Would all files
created with either be broken?

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.

> So either "it just works" in user space, or people haven't figured out the
> kernel could help them. Or decided it's not worth it, exactly because
> they'd still have to support systems/filesystems that can't be converted.

> Linus