linux-kernel - Re: "Why Reuser 4 still is not in" doc

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-Id: <200607171425.19816.a1426z@gawab.com>
Date:	Mon, 17 Jul 2006 14:25:19 +0300
From:	Al Boldi <a1426z@...ab.com>
To:	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: "Why Reuser 4 still is not in" doc

Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >> > (aside from the VFS integration debate)
> >>
> >> Anybody know what's in Reiser4 that VFS doesn't like (link please)?
> >
> > Reiser4 plug-ins have (had?) the ability to alter the semantics of
> > things, like making files into directories inside
>
> Yes, it changes the semantics. Suddenly you can "cd linux-2.6.17.tar.bz2".
> But what will stat() return? S_IFDIR? S_IFREG? S_IFANY? A .tar parser in
> kernelspace is almost never the right thing. And then a cpio parser,
> because that's what initramfs'es are made of. Not to forget .zip, because
> that's omnipresent. Oh of course we'd also need bzip2 and gzip decoder.
> BASE64 and UU anyone?

Using this as an argument against plug-ins is a bit strange.  I suppose 
somebody could go overboard and use plug-ins to implement a subKernel.  
Would this then imply that plug-ins are wrong?

> > which you could see meta-files like
> > file/uid and file/size which contained meta-data and such accessible as
> > normal files to all the unix tools (which is a very good idea IMO). You
> > could get things like chmod by just 'echo root
> >
> >> file/owner' or something, very nice.
>
> I wish you a lot of fun with users in LDAP or other exotic storage
> methods. By making Everything possible through echo, you are violating the
> unix philosophy that one tool should do one thing (though echo does just
> that). 

The unix philosophy would hold with plug-ins, as this would aid flexibility.  
Using plug-ins is a form of modularization, much like the 'one tool should 
do one thing' approach.

> And in this case, echo would be chown, chmod, tar, bzip2 all at
> once. This sounds familiar, I think I have seen this with explorer.exe
> (and its uncountable DLLs), which lets you change everything within the
> same window.

Nothing wrong with that, unless you have an allergy against explorer.

> What I think is promising are the compression/encryption plugins. ext2
> and 3 had an attribute (`lsattr`) for compression but it does not seem
> like ever implemented.

Now that's a great example for using a plug-in in the wright place.

> > This was frowned upon by kernel developers who felt that it belonged in
> > the kernel VFS (if at all), rather than in reiser4 directly.

This is really the crux of the issue.  Introducing plug-ins into the FS is 
really the wrong place, when we already have an abstracted VFS that allows 
this to be fanned out to its children.

Thanks!

--
Al

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/