Re: [rfc] new stat*fs-like syscall?

[Andrew Lutomirski <luto@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu> wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jun 2010, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> Something like fsid but actually specified to uniquely identify a
>> superblock.  (Currently, fsid seems to be set by the filesystem, and
>> nothing in particular ensures that two different filesystems couldn't
>> have collisions.)  We could guarantee (or have a flag guaranteeing) that
>> (fsid, st_inode) actually uniquely identifies an inode.
>>
>> Similarly, something like fsid that uniquely identifies the vfsmount
>> could be useful, although I don't know how easy that would be to provide
>> for fstat?fs.
>>
>> If we could expose the complete set of filesystem mount options so that
>> mount(1) didn't have to look at /proc/self/mounts or /etc/mtab, then
>> playing with chroots would be that much easier.
>>
>> Should we expose superblock and vfsmount options separately?  We have
>> read-only bind mounts now, but the way they work is rather inscrutable,
>> and if stat?fs could say "superblock is read-write but vfsmount is
>> readonly" then people might be able to make more sense of what's going on.
>
> You'll find all of those things in /proc/self/mountinfo.

Wasn't the point that /proc/self/mounts (and presumably
/proc/self/mountinfo) isn't scalable and we wanted a syscall to query
it efficiently (and racelessly)?

--Andy