On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 01:07:38AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 07:01:28PM -0400, Olivier Galibert wrote:
> > Currently the on-disk structures for translators in ext2 allow for an
> > inode to be both a passive translator and a file (or directory) with
> > actual contents. AFAICT, this capability is not used anywhere for
> > now. I'm not even sure it is accessible from the filesystem
> > interface.
>
> The underlying node is accessible to the translator, and this can and will
> be used for example for filter (or for example for activity logging etc).
But only the translator has access to it? That's yucky. This means
that things can be hidden behind a translator and the only way for
both yourself and the sysadmin to know what's there is to remove it?
It's probably even too magic for the translator itself. This does not
work:
dd if=/dev/zero of=dummy bs=1024k count=8
mke2fs dummy
settrans -c dummy /hurd/ext2fs `pwd`/dummy
...because the translator will end up looping on itself.
> > My question is, do we really need this capability, or would a on-disk
> > implementation of translators which would use the same allocation
> > scheme as files (or symlinks, probably) would be ok? That would
> > remove the block pointer in osd1 and only use one bit in the inode
> > flags to say "this is a translator".
>
> Well, I think it is a useful feature and will be used (maybe optionally) in
> translators. I have some ideas about it. It's the same in Linux, btw. You
> can set mount point on existing directories with real content. Disallowing
> this would inconvenience the users, too.
Under linux a mountpoint is the equivalent of an _active_ translator,
not a passive one. I have nothing against active translators over,
well, mostly whatever.
OG.
