>In essense, I was >thinking of splitting up the concepts of 1) accessing the filesystem on >the HDD/device and 2) setting up a namespace for accessing the files >into two separate concepts
I've been crusading for years to get people to understand that a classic Unix mount is composed of these two parts, and they don't have to be married together. (1) is called creating a filesystem image and (2) is called mounting a filesystem image. (2) isn't actually "setting up" a namespace. There's one namespace. Mounting is adding the names in a filesystem to that namespace, and thereby making the named filesystem objects accessible. The two pieces have been slowly divorcing over the years. We now have a little-used ability to have a filesystem image exist without being mounted at all (you get that by forcibly unmounting a filesystem image that has open files. The unmount happens right away, but the filesystem image continues to exist until the last file is closed). We also have the bind mounts that add to the namespace without creating a new filesystem image. I would like someday to see the ability to create a filesystem image without ever mounting it, and access a file in it without ever adding it to the master file namespace. >bringing up 2) completely in the userspace. That part's another issue. The user-controls-his-namespace aspect of it has been commented on at length in this and another current thread. -- Bryan Henderson IBM Almaden Research Center San Jose CA Filesystems - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
