Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code in userspace

Christer Weinigel
2001-05-19T09:59:12Z

In article <Pine.LNX.4.33.0105190138150.6079-100000@toomuch.toronto.redhat.com> you write:
>3. Userspace partition code proposal
>
> Given the above two bits, here's a brief explaination of a
> proposal to move management of the partitioning scheme into
> userspace, along with portions of raid startup, lvm, uuid and
> mount by label code needed for mounting the root filesystem.
>
> Consider that the device node currently known as /dev/hda5 can
> also be viewed as /dev/hda at offset 512000 with a limit of 10GB.
> With the extensions in fs/block_dev.c, you could replace /dev/hda5
> with /dev/hda/offset=512000,limit=10240000000. Now, by putting
> the partition parsing code into a libpart and binding mount to a
> libpart, the root filesystem mounting code can be run out of an
> initrd image. The use of mount gives us the ability to mount
> filesystems by UUID, by label or other exotic schemes without
> having to add any additional code to the kernel.

The only problem I can see with this is that it removes one useful thing,
the ability to give a user access to a whole partition.

chown wingel /dev/hda5

won't work anymore since there is no such device node.

/Christer
--
"Just how much can I get away with and still go to heaven?"