Re: "Hyper-Mount" option possible???

[Helge Hafting <helgehaf@idb.hist.no>]

"Mark W. McClelland" wrote:
> 
> Robert L Martin wrote:
> >
> > Not on list just throwing an idea out.
> > One thing that "bugs" me is if a given drive has more than one partion
> > each partion has to be mounted seperatly.
> > With CDs this also means you can not mount "split" cds in full if you
> > want to. Soo  Given that Super-Mount is already taken, How about (in
> > 2.5??)  hashing out a Hypermount option.
> 
> This would also make it easier to mount media that only have one
> partition. For example, some of my Zip disks have to be mounted as
> "sdb", some as "sdb1", and some as "sdb4", depending on what OS
> formatted it.
> 
> I think this might also be good for multisession CDs, though I'm not
> really sure how they are currently handled.
> 
> > The way it could work is if you mount a full drive say "hdd" and have
> > each partion mounted on a tree from the mount point
> > of the drive.
> 
> This would require mount to check for a partition table first, since
> "hdd" could either mean "hdd as a partitionless device" or "all devices
> on hdd". This check could probably even be done in user space, along
> with "hyper-mount". Maybe someone has done it already; I'll have to
> check freshmeat :)

This looks like a job for a script.  I.e. no kernel change necessary.

The script could go something like this:
1. User invokes with "hypermount sdb" in case of the sdb device
2. The script creates a /mnt/sdb directory
3. The script creates a /mnt/sdb/sdb<n> directory for
   each sdb1, sdb2,... found in /dev
4. /dev/sdb1 is then mounted on /mnt/sdb/sdb1 and so on.

You may also want some checks that the device isn't mounted already,
remove subdirectories that didn't mount (error return from the "mount"
command)

A "hyper-umount sdb" would simply umount every directory under /mnt/sdb/

This isn't really a kernel issue, you may want to discuss this with
distribution
maintainers instead.

Helge Hafting
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