Thank you for your reply. You have really helped me to better understand this function. It is much appreciated.
-Matthew- On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 02:39:16 +0100, Holly Bostick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Matt Place wrote: > > What exactly is supermount, why is it considered 'evil', and was it > > disabled for its supposed 'evilness'? > > Supermount is one of the methodologies for making removable drives act > the way they do under Windows; the media is automatically unmounted when > removed (via the button to eject on the drive), and the media > automatically remounted and refreshed when inserted (so that the > contents of the new media are correctly shown). > > I'm not a kernel hacker, but the short version of why it is considered > evil is that kernel devs feel that this is a userspace function that > should not be managed by the kernel (and additionally that the hacks > required to make the kernel manage this functionality are ... evil... in > programmer terms). > > Yes, the patch that enables supermount (supermount is not a native > kernel function) was removed from at least the gentoo-dev-sources > because it was obsoleted (which the kernel devs had presumably been > trying to accomplish for some time). From the Changelog for > gentoo-dev-sources: > > - Removed supermount patch, am told that udev makes this obsolete > now. Also, it didn't apply to 2.6.8 anymore, so that made for a good > reason to drop it :). > > The idea was (I guess) that userspace functions like dbus/hal/ivman or > even the (presumably less evil) kernelspace subfs were mature enough to > replace supermount (for those that want this functionality; everybody > doesn't) in combination with udev, but in my experience, this is not the > case. > > Holly > > -- > [email protected] mailing list > > -- [email protected] mailing list
