Tim Hockin wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 02:06:34PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>>>Can you maybe share some details? I think this deign moves MORE state to
>>>userspace (expiry aside). The "state" in kernel is really mostly sent back
>>>to userspace. No more passing pipes into the kernel (state) or tracking the
>>>pgid of the daemon (state).
>>
>>If you want to fire up a new daemon, all that state that was supposed to
>>be kept in userspace has to be reconstructed. That means the kernel has
>>to have all that information; this would include stuff like what kind of
>>umount policy you want for each key entry (the current daemon doesn't do
>>that because it doesn't have the proper state.)
>
> I'm not really sure what you're saying., here. I'm sorry. Not trying to be
> thick, just not understanding.
>
> What umount policy? What state is supposed to be kept in userspace that isn't?
>
The current autofs daemon, for example, does not handle different
procedures on umount. This is particularly important when you have
mount trees.
>
>>>The daemon as it stands does NOT handle namespaces, does NOT handle expiry
>>>well, and is a pretty sad copy of an old design.
>>
>>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.
-hpa
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