patch to mount(8) to support optional filesystem mounts

Matthew Dillon dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Fri Jan 23 13:16:29 PST 2004


:Well, I started thinking about it harder and came up with something a
:bit more radical: don't use "mount -a" at all in the boot process
:(effectively deprecating the auto/noauto options.)
:
:Instead, make /etc/rc.d/mountall a sort of meta-script that doesn't do
:much beyond "REQUIRE: mount_usr mount_var mount_proc mount_others"
:Where each of these subsidary scripts just mounts a particular device. 
:(Actually, that might be a bad way to split it up; maybe more along the
:lines of permanent/temporary, but whatever.)
:
:The motivation for doing it this way would be to let it be really
:sophisticated - you might want to try to mount a filesystem only if a
:certain file can't be found on some other filesystem (which itself must
:first be mounted.)  So the mount points would follow a dependency graph
:...
:Sorry for the verbose brain dump, still trying to clarify my thoughts.
:
:-Chris

    Well, the problem here is that 99.9% of the system installations do
    not need that sort of sophistication, and do need all the mounts in
    /etc/fstab that aren't 'noauto' to be mounted for the system and third
    party software to come up properly.  We do not want support for more
    sophisticated situations to make life difficult for 99.9% of the 
    system operators out there that do not need such support.

    So what this means is that extending fstab options should maintain
    backwards compatibility, especially in this case where it just isn't
    that big a deal to add an option for specially-handled mounts that an
    rc file can then process.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>





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