Re: [prepatch] address_space-based writeback

Denis Vlasenko
2002-05-03T09:34:45Z

On 2 May 2002 06:49, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
> >And I recently moved my /usr/src to separate partition.
> >That is, /usr/src is now a mount point.
> >I have to export it in NFS exports *and* mount it *on every workstation*
> >(potentially thousands of wks!).
>
> Yes, edit /etc/fstab. My file server has loads of partitions and it exports
> them all and /etc/fstab on all clients just mounts them all. Problem being?

Problem is that I have to modify /etc/fstab on every workstation.

> >I'll repeat myself. What if some advanced fs has no sensible way of
> >generating inode? Does it have to 'fake' it, just like [v]fat does it now?
> >(Yes, vfat is not 'advanced' fs, let's not discuss it...)
>
> They have to fake it yes. Otherwise all existing userspace utilities will
> break. And no they cannot be changed otherwise they would no longer work
> on non-Linux platforms and most utilities are UNIX utilities which work on
> everything including Linux. You don't want to break that.

It seems to me like the Bad Thing which is too old and traditional to change.
:-(

> That would break UNIX semantics. Which it seems is exactly what you want to
> do... I don't think you will find many supporters of that idea... As Linus
> pointed out to me the inode is the basic i/o entity in UNIX and hence
> Linux. And that is not going to change...

Yes, it isn't going to change.
--
vda