From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Subject: Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives (was: silent semantic changes with reiser4)
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 19:50:34 +0200
Message-ID: <20040902175034.GA18861@lst.de>
References: <20040826150202.GE5733@mail.shareable.org> <200408282314.i7SNErYv003270@localhost.localdomain> <20040901200806.GC31934@mail.shareable.org> <Pine.LNX.4.58.0409011311150.2295@ppc970.osdl.org> <1094118362.4847.23.camel@localhost.localdomain> <Pine.LNX.4.58.0409021045210.2295@ppc970.osdl.org>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>,
   Horst von Brand <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl>, Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>,
   Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>, viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk,
   Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
   Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
   Alexander Lyamin aka FLX <flx@namesys.com>,
   ReiserFS List <reiserfs-list@namesys.com>
Return-path: <reiserfs-list-return-21299-reiserfs=m.gmane.org@namesys.com>
list-help: <mailto:reiserfs-list-help@namesys.com>
list-unsubscribe: <mailto:reiserfs-list-unsubscribe@namesys.com>
list-post: <mailto:reiserfs-list@namesys.com>
Errors-To: flx@namesys.com
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0409021045210.2295@ppc970.osdl.org>
List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org

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.