vfs/vnode/file overhaul

Dennis Melentyev dennis.melentyev at gmail.com
Wed Jul 25 03:08:20 PDT 2007


Although not precisely in a topic, but somewhat related:
It would be great to eliminate long standing bug-o-featire in FreeBSD,
famous Floppy-Panic when removing unmounted removable media causes a
panic. It was quite ok with floppies, since they were rarely used, but
really annoing with USB sticks and HDD's.
The same issue recently raised again in freebsd-stable list. But AFAIU
we have completely different VFS layer. So, this case could already
had been covered. Just ignore it if so.
2007/7/25, Simon 'corecode' Schubert <corecode at fs.ei.tum.de>:
Hey,

as a 1.11 topic I think we should change the vnode/file interface to make more sense.  these are of course just stupid ideas to illustrate what I am thinking of:

- all per-fdesc-I/O runs through a struct file and not directly to a vnode
- vnodes only represent logical entities (on disk), NOT devices or whatnot.
- thus drop specfs, this always seemed switched in at the wrong place in the stack
- this will allow us to do device cloning
- a slim vnode interface makes it easier to do support a...
- userland vfs interface which can support something like the kernel API, so userland drivers have a chance to be easily ported to the kernel.
do I make sense?  feedback expected!

cheers
  simon
--
Serve - BSD     +++  RENT this banner advert  +++    ASCII Ribbon   /"\
Work - Mac      +++  space for low €€€ NOW!1  +++      Campaign     \ /
Party Enjoy Relax   |   http://dragonflybsd.org      Against  HTML   \
Dude 2c 2 the max   !   http://golden-apple.biz       Mail + News   / \


--
Dennis Melentyev





More information about the Kernel mailing list