Re: filesystem namespace regions, or making mountd less bozotic

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 09:51:31PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 09:29:06PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> > I am tired of PR 3019 and its many duplicates, so I'd like to see a
> > scheme that allows managing arbitrary subtrees of the filesystem
> > namespace in a reasonably useful manner.
> > 
> > The immediate application is nfs exports and mountd; however, I expect
> > the resulting mechanism will also be useful for handling chroots and
> > possibly also inotify-type mechanisms.
> 
> Haven't you forgotten about 'file handles'.
>
> Since they refer to files you don't know anything about the containing
> directory.

We could swizzle the contents of the NFS filehandle so it depended on the
region, not the filesystem mountpoint.  There are some other Unix systems
that do something like this -- Irix is one, I think.

That would be a great gain in flexibility.

Thor