Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Shadow directories

[Jaroslav Sykora <jara@sin.cvut.cz>]

On Thursday 18 of October 2007, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >> >
> >> >The '^' is an escape character and it tells the computer to treat the file as a directory.
> >> 
> >> But what you could do is: write a FUSE fs that mirrors the lower content
> >> (lofs/fuseloop/however it was named) and expands .zip files as
> >> directories are readdir'ed or the zip files stat'ed. That saves us
> >> from cluttering up the Linux VFS with such stuff.
> >
> >Yes, that's exactly what RheaVFS and AVFS do. Except that they both use an escape
> >character because:
> >1. without it some programs may break [ http://lwn.net/Articles/100148/ ]
> >2. it's very useful to pass additional parameters after the escape char to the server.
> >
> >We can start VFS servers (mentioned above) and chroot the whole user session into
> >the mount directory of the server. It works but it's very slow, practically unusable.
> 
> Sounds like a program bug, since NTFS-3G is proof of concept that FUSE
> can be fast.
> 

Good point, I'll look onto it.

A minor implementation problem with chrooted environment is that the FUSE VFS server
must be run with root privileges to allow setuid programs on the mounted filesystems.
But it's certainly doable.


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