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

Christoph Hellwig
2004-09-02T17:50:34Z

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 10:46:32AM -0700, Linus Torvalds 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.
>
> 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.

http://oss.oracle.com/projects/userfs/ has code that clues gnomevfs onto
a kernel filesystem. The code is horrible, but it shows that it can
be done.