Messages in this thread | | | From | Torrey Hoffman <> | Subject | on /etc/mtab vs. /proc/mounts (Was RE: Linux should better cope w ith power failure) | Date | Mon, 19 Mar 2001 15:05:55 -0800 |
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(Recipients trimmed, as this is a major change of topic...) [big cut]
> Actually, I think /etc/mtab is not needed at all.
This is already mostly correct, AFAIK.
My embedded system uses "busybox" for mount and umount, /etc/mtab does not exist, and the root file system is readonly.
But if I do "umount -a" it works. So the busybox umount is already reading /proc/mounts.
The only oddity I see with using /proc/mounts is that it shows: /dev/root / ext2 rw 0 0 instead of /dev/hda1 / ext2 rw 0 0
but this doesn't seem to cause any problems... even though /dev/root does not exist (!)
In fact, the "mount" man page on my Mandrake 7.2 system says:
"It is possible to replace /etc/mtab by a symbolic link to /proc/mounts..." and then goes on to describe some of the issues and problems with doing so - loopback, and paths with spaces seem to be the significant ones.
Hopefully those problems can and will be solved soon, and then we can get rid of /etc/mtab completely, and keep the root partition read only almost all the time.
Torrey Hoffman - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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