A common VFS and a Common conf-system (Was: namespacing)

[Avery Pennarun]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 07:25:16PM +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:45:59 -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > Unfortunately, it's Linux only, and has an incredibly brain-dead design
> > where you have to utilize "round-trips" through the kernel for something
> > that essentially happens entirely in user-space, and forces a superbly
> > poor API (POSIX) onto all its file systems, including those where POSIX
> > makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
> 
> Zen question: If a filesystem can't support POSIX, does that mean it's
> not really a filesystem at all?

Yes.  However, Sean was really making the opposite point: I think he wants
filesystems that support *more* than POSIX file semantics.  For example, the
ability to do asynchronous readahead or HTTP POST.

If you use only FUSE, you're limited to *only* POSIX.  If you merely support
FUSE, you must support POSIX - which is wise anyway, because it's extremely
well thought-out - but you can add extra stuff where it makes sense to do
so.

Have fun,

Avery