Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 1/2] libfsimage

[John Levon <levon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 11:14:00AM +0000, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 19:58 +0100, John Levon wrote:
> > These two patches re-work pygrub to use a generic C library for reading
> > filesystem images. An immediate benefit is that there's no longer any
> > external dependencies, so all the filesystems always 'just work'.
> 
> The downside is that it no longer picks up updates, fixes etc. from the
> official upstream support for libext2fs / libreiserfs, so we're just
> duplicating the places where filesystem support needs to be maintained.

You mean upstream grub, not upstream libraries. It's not hard to sync
against grub. When grub2 is up and running, it should be truly trivial,
as no source changes should be required; the FS drivers there were
developed in userspace, so it's not even a 'fork'.

> If xen packages are properly built, filesystems will Just Work anyway.

On what operating system would that be?

> > Slightly longer term, providing a stable C API for filesystem support
> > adds a considerable amount of future proofing.
> 
> That I can agree with.  But I'd rather see that API done as a wrapper
> around existing upstream filesystem libraries, rather than forking fs
> userspace support entirely.

Vendors are free to write such plugins if they'd prefer it that way. As
it is with using grub code, you get UFS support for free, we get ext2
and reiserfs, and it's trivially extendible to anything that grub needs
to boot...

regards
john

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