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

["Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 15:02 +0000, John Levon wrote:

> > I most confess to not atually having read the patches...  What I
> > imagined was a way of invoking a binary (or script) to read a file from
> > a filesystem. The binary might be linked against e.g. libext2fs, or have
> > an fs parsing implementation compiled in.
> 
> Plugins are simply provided as a shared image in e.g.
> /usr/lib/ext2fs/fsimage.so. Originally I was planning on using the "call
> a binary" approach, but Jeremy was very unhappy with that, and it is
> somewhat more awkward for searching for grub's config file, etc.

The existing python pygrub code *is* basically using a plugin
architecture, with separate python modules for each filesystem.  You
supply your own python code, including where needed a C glue layer, for
whatever mechanism is used underneath for the fs access.

I have no objection at all to using grub-based code for those
filesystems where it's the best option.  But I just don't want to be
moving to that wholesale.  With my ext3 developer hat on, I'd expect
libext2fs to get support for the new extents format in ext4 faster than
grub, for example.

So if adding grub-derived modules is going to give us better reiserfs
support, or add UFS support, then that's fine, as long as we can leave
the existing ext2 loader using libext2fs, and continue with an
architecture that lets us use libreiserfs too if that gets fixed.

Cheers,
 Stephen



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