From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 14 13:48:24 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E6FAA16A4CE; Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:48:24 -0800 (PST) Received: from gw.catspoiler.org (217-ip-163.nccn.net [209.79.217.163]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0A98D43D49; Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:48:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from truckman@FreeBSD.org) Received: from FreeBSD.org (mousie.catspoiler.org [192.168.101.2]) by gw.catspoiler.org (8.12.9p2/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i0ELm77E040545; Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:48:11 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from truckman@FreeBSD.org) Message-Id: <200401142148.i0ELm77E040545@gw.catspoiler.org> Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:48:07 -0800 (PST) From: Don Lewis To: rwatson@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/plain; charset=us-ascii cc: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org cc: kientzle@acm.org Subject: Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 21:48:25 -0000 On 14 Jan, Robert Watson wrote: > On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote: > > ... > > All this generally sounds good. > >> LIBARCHIVE BACKGROUND >> >> As many of you know, I've been working on a project to overhaul the pkg >> tools. Among many other things, this requires a library that can >> read/write tar archives. This avoids the significant overhead imposed >> from forking a separate tar program. > > If you become a bored person requiring entertainment, it might be quite > interesting to create a read-only tarfs for use as a root file system > loaded in an md device. While there's a lot more to it than this, one of > the more irritating things about our current release build is that it > requires privilege so that it can chroot(), but also so it can manage md > devices and file system images. Just being able to use a tarball instead > of a UFS image would go a long way, although presumably require changes to > our loader as well. For work with diskless systems and network booting, > I'd much rather stick a tarball on an NFS server than create UFS images. > > I know NetBSD has a neat tool to create file systems from userspace > without privilege, but my understanding is that it has to pull in a lot of > code from the kernel in fairly messy ways. Since tar files are a well > supported portable format... :-) Why not use iso9660? The userland code already exists to create it and the file system code already exists to read it.