Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 17:45:09 -0800 From: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@icir.org> To: current@freebsd.org Subject: userland|unprivileged file system handling tools Message-ID: <20040322174509.A28739@xorpc.icir.org>
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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 ? cheers luigi
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