Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:09:49 -0700 From: Greg Lewis <glewis@eyesbeyond.com> To: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Cc: Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc@crodrigues.org>, Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: [RFC] mount can figure out fstype automatically Message-ID: <20060711200949.GA42576@misty.eyesbeyond.com> In-Reply-To: <20060710202219.GA29786@infradead.org> References: <20060708152801.GA3671@crodrigues.org> <44AFD7DF.8090002@errno.com> <20060708174606.GA29602@infradead.org> <44B2A51A.4040103@samsco.org> <20060710202219.GA29786@infradead.org>
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On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 09:22:19PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 01:06:02PM -0600, Scott Long wrote: > > So in your opinion and experience, what are the pros and cons of > > maintaining a table of magic numbers? > > The feature is imensely useful. The implementation won't win any > points for a clean design but works very well in practice. I think > it's definitly better than probing in the kernel because letting a filesystem > driver try to make sense of something that's not it's own format can > lead to all kinds of funnies. Linux does this (iterating all filesystem > types in kernel) for the special case of the root filesystem where mount(8) > is not available, and it showeds various interesting bugs at least in the > fat driver. It also (the root filesystem special case) has a tendency to give misleading error messages which cost me a number of lost hours and grey hairs in my previous job. -- Greg Lewis Email : glewis@eyesbeyond.com Eyes Beyond Web : http://www.eyesbeyond.com Information Technology FreeBSD : glewis@FreeBSD.org
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