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Diffstat (limited to 'community/gsoc')
| -rw-r--r-- | community/gsoc/project_ideas/unionmount.mdwn | 60 |
1 files changed, 60 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/unionmount.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/unionmount.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 00000000..89b53123 --- /dev/null +++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/unionmount.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +[[meta copyright="Copyright © 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]] + +[[meta license="""[[toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[toggleable +id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this +document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or +any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant +Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license +is included in the section entitled +[[GNU_Free_Documentation_License|/fdl]]."]]"""]] + +[[meta title="Union Mounts"]] + +When setting a translator on Hurd -- similar to mounting a file system on UNIX +-- the new node(s) exported by the translator are obscuring the original node +where the translator is set, and any nodes below it in the directory tree. The +translator itself can access the underlying node (which is a very nice feature, +as it allows translators presenting the contents of the node in a different +format); but it's no longer accessible from the "outside". + +Plan9 has a feature where a file system can be mounted in union mode: the new +file system doesn't obscure the mount point in this case, but instead the +contents are combined. (This feature has also been under discussion in Linux +for a couple of years now, under the label "VFS-based union mounts".) + +This kind of union mounts is generally useful, as it's sometimes more +convenient than unioning existing filesystem locations with unionfs -- it's not +necessary to mount a file system that is to be unioned at some external +location first: just union-mount it directly at the target location. + +But union mounts also allow creating passive translator hierarchies: If there +is a passive translator on a parent node, and further passive translators on +child nodes, the union mount allows the child nodes with the further translator +settings still to be visible after the parent translator has started. + +This could be useful for device nodes for example: let's say we have an +ethernet multiplexer at /dev/veth. Now the virtual subnodes could all be +directly under /dev, i.e. /dev/veth0, /dev/veth1 etc., and explicitely refer to +the main /dev/veth node in the translator command line. It would be more +elegant however to store the virtual nodes direcly below the main multiplexer +node -- /dev/veth/0, /dev/veth/1 etc. + +There are two possible approaches how union mounts could be implemented in the +Hurd. The first one is to let the various translators handle union mounts +internally, i.e. let them present the underlying nodes to the clients in +addition to the actual nodes they export themselfs. This probably can be +implemented as some kind of extension to the existing netfs and diskfs +libraries. + +The other possible apporach is less efficient and probably more tricky, but +probably also more generic: create a special unionmount translator, which +serves as a kind of proxy: setting the union-mounted translator on some +internal node; and at the actual mount location, presenting a union of the +nodes exported by this translator, and the nodes from the underlying file +system. + +The goal of this project is implementing union mounts using either of the +approaches described above. (Though it might be useful initially to prototype +both for comparision.) The ethernet multiplexer shall serve as an example use +case -- any changes necessary to allow using it with the union mount +functionality are also to be considered part of the task. |