Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 07 Jan 2004 11:19:19 -0500 | From | Mike Waychison <> | Subject | Re: [autofs] [RFC] Towards a Modern Autofs |
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H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Tim Hockin wrote: > >>On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 02:06:34PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: >> >>> >>>First of all, I'll be blunt: namespaces currently provide zero benefit >>>in Linux, and virtually noone uses them. I have discussed this with >>>Linus in the past, and neither one of us see namespaces as being worth >> >>Let's get rid of them, then. Make life that much easier. >> > > > That's what the Linux community is doing, de facto. The Linux userspace > simply is not set up to handle namespaces, and the autofs daemon is no > exception. Consider such a simple thing as /etc/mtab - /proc/mounts > which is necessary for most of the mount(8) functionality to work. It > doesn't support namespaces and really cannot be made to. > > namespace support in Linux is at the best a far-off future goal. It is > one thing to put in infrastructure, especially since it has some other > nice benefits; it's another thing to revamp all of userspace to use it; > it's nowhere close and autofs is no exception. >
This is clearly not 'all of userspace'. Autofs is an exception. As is /etc/mtab. The way I see it, automounting is a 'mount facility', as are namespaces. The two should be made to work together. Yes, mount(8) should probably be fixed one way or another as well due to /etc/mtab breakage. Why? Because it too is a mount facility.
There are a couple problems inherent with namespaces. Most of these are mount facilities that are broken such as mentioned above. They *should* be fixed to work nicely.
Other parts of userspace get confused with namespaces, eg: cron and atd. These programs clearly need infrastructure added that somehow allows for arbitrary namespace joining/saving. If you have suggestions for how we can solve this issue, please do let me know. I'm stumped :\ I'd be more than happy to discuss this with you.
One not-so-far fetched approach would be to associate cron/at jobs with automount configurations so that a namespace can be re-constructed at runtime.
-- Mike Waychison Sun Microsystems, Inc. 1 (650) 352-5299 voice 1 (416) 202-8336 voice mailto: Michael.Waychison@Sun.COM http://www.sun.com
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