Journaling libraries / VFS interception

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

Hi,
I'm wondering if there are any plans to provide a userspace library to
the journaling infrastructure: It'd pretty obvious that there's a host
of potential uses for it that don't belong into the kernel and could
greatly benefit from a standardised library (and possibly a socket
that feeds them all the new data for thos that need to in (near) real
time like instant replication).

At first, a library that simply provides a understandable data format
to the user land would be helpful, but ideally, a second layer
where you can register call backs for all major functions would be a
boon for many uses (in an OO world, I'd say a base class where you can
override any of the functions you care to use [1]).

Whereas that's mostly oriented on the past (as all journalling
obviously has to be) for some applications, it would be pretty useful
to be able to proactively intercept VFS operations before they take
place (on access virus scanning and mandatory access control
spring to my mind).

Ideally, the same interface would be used for both features where
applicable but most operations make sense in both with the only
difference being that you can abort/change the behavior in VFS
interception routines whereas you can only more accept and
parse it in journalling based routines.


[1] preferably using inversion of control.