> > I feel a bit responsible for the current state of supermount, since I > talked Juan into fixing floppy-write-PANIC issues, which seems to have > utterly broken supermount for CDROMS in the released 9.0 kernel. > > A simple 'find' in /mnt/cdrom will probably reveal what I'm talking about > (half the files cannot be stat-ed). In addition, there is the problem of > non-freeing inodes on zips and floppies. >
For CD-ROM - I cannot seem to be able to reproduce it using obvious steps. You may be hit by remaining problem (I did send patch for it together with others and as with others never heard anything about it :-/ - if after changing media _anything_ had accessed device before supermount got a chance to do it (in reported case it was eject -t), "media change" flag is lost so supermount did not invalidate old i-nodes with very much undefined consequences. My solution was to add "media changed" flag to superblock and update it in when system first detects this condition. It was the simplest solution I assure you :) I do not understand what "non-freezing" inodes are, could you elaborate please? > Juan, Andrey and probably others, did a great job on patching up > supermount for each release, but I do have to admit that I have not seem > it working without problems in the 2.4.x series. > I did. 2.4.18-18mdk + my supermount patches. I could use Zip/floppy in read/write mode - and I _did_ use them, really. I admit I did not hit "VFAT system full" and cannot comment on it and there was a problem with "inode busy on changed media" but even with this I had _zero_ problems. > So, the question is, since the default enabling of supermount is bound to > get people into trouble (try to install a game or whatever from CD), > shouldn't there be an update ASAP for 9.0 with a 1) a fix or 2) disabled > default supermount. At least it should be added to the errate page. > Could you please elaborate what exact problems you had in 9.0 so I could (try to) reproduce it? It may take some time though... > > For cooker I really would like to hear (Juan/Andreys) opinion on > volumagic: > http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/alan/Software/System/Volumagic/ > > it mounts disks in userspace, and works already for CDROM drives. > Is there any reason not to move to this tool for 9.1? It needs some work, > but on the long therm certainly looks like a better solution than > supermount. > As long as there is a mature product ... just now it is just a proof of concept, nothing more. > One problem remains that can perhaps only be fixed in the kernel: floppies > need to sync immediatly (==performance loss) when writing, because the > possibility of a manual eject on pc-hardware (this is probably a design > error, MAC does it better;) > Any write on removable media must be done synchronously. You can just as well eject PCMCIA card hooked to your Jaz drive or unplug USB cable... -andrey Please, Cc me as I am not on this list currently.
