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

Frank van Maarseveen
2004-09-02T23:41:35Z

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 07:19:47PM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
>
> > cd FC2-i386-disc1.iso
> > ls
>
> That one's at least theoretically doable, assuming that it really *IS* the
> Fedora Core disk and an ISO9660 format...

Impressive.

But when it comes to file-systems like ext[23] I think an in-kernel
solution might be preferable to get the exact semantics wrt locking,
atomicity, synchronization, coherency, whatever a kernel is good at
for filesystems.

> > cd /dev/cdrom
> > ls
>
> And the CD in the drive at the moment is AC/DC "Back in Black". What
> should this produce as output?

bash: cd: /dev/cdrom: Not a directory

When it doesn't match a (sub)set of known file system types I think.
Because that is the area the kernel has knowledge about. Nothing
else, no tarballs for example unless of course the kernel has "tarfs" :-)

--
Frank