Re: reiser4 plugins

Jeff Garzik
2005-06-22T01:14:23Z

Hans Reiser wrote:
> Christoph,
>
> Reiser4 users love the plugin concept, and all audiences which have
> listened to a presentation on plugins have been quite positive about
> it. Many users think it is the best thing about reiser4. Can you
> articulate why you are opposed to plugins in more detail? Perhaps you
> are simply not as familiar with it as the audiences I have presented
> to. Perhaps persons on our mailing list can comment.....
>
> In particular, what is wrong with having a plugin id associated with
> every file, storing the pluginid on disk in permanent storage in the
> stat data, and having that plugin id define the set of methods that
> implement the vfs operations associated with a particular file, rather
> than defining VFS methods only at filesystem granularity?

You're basically implementing another VFS layer inside of reiser4, which
is a big layering violation.

This sort of feature should -not- be done at the low-level filesystem level.

What happens if people decide plugins are a good idea, and they want
them in ext3? We need massive surgery to extract the guts from reiser4.

Jeff