From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Mar 22 18:17:47 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2960716A4CE for ; Mon, 22 Mar 2004 18:17:47 -0800 (PST) Received: from otter3.centtech.com (moat3.centtech.com [207.200.51.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BC98C43D2D for ; Mon, 22 Mar 2004 18:17:46 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Received: from centtech.com ([192.168.42.25]) by otter3.centtech.com (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id i2N2HjE8070851; Mon, 22 Mar 2004 20:17:46 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Message-ID: <405F9E45.5060208@centtech.com> Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 20:17:41 -0600 From: Eric Anderson User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 (X11/20040304) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Luigi Rizzo References: <20040322174509.A28739@xorpc.icir.org> In-Reply-To: <20040322174509.A28739@xorpc.icir.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: userland|unprivileged file system handling tools X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 02:17:47 -0000 Luigi Rizzo wrote: >We seem to lack tools that allow the generation/handling of file >system images without root privs. The 'standard techniques' used >to build the bootable floppies rely on vnconfig/mdconfig, disklabel, >fsck and mknod which all must run as root. > >Colin Percival pointed me to ports/sysutils/makefs which builds an >almost correct fs image -- it has a couple of bugs, one which is >trivially fixed, the other one which could be cured by a pass of >fsck. There is still the issue of creating a label for the image >(which right now i do using a small C program), and handling device >nodes (not an issue on 5.x, but this could be possibly fixed with >some makefs extension). > >So: > > + is there interest in having makefs become part of the > standard system, instead of a port ? > > + how hard would it be to teach disklabel and fsck to > work on files (filesystem images) as well as devices ? > > > I'd be interested in those tools, and I'm sure they would be very helpful for those of use building small embedded-like devices. I was very happy with the discovery of makefs, and I'd love to see it (or something like it) in the standard system, along with the supporting other tools. I'd help, but I'm not much of a C coder at this point. :) I can test though. Eric -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Anderson Sr. Systems Administrator Centaur Technology Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. ------------------------------------------------------------------