Rick Byers <rickb@iaw.on.ca> writes:
> However, there are obviously still some pretty serious problems in the
> union file system.

Yup. Bill Sommerfeld says he's hacking on it now.

> I know it's pretty late in the schedule, but I think something should be
> done about this before 1.4 is released.

Something should also be done about the Vietnam War
war. Unfortunately, the opportunity for doing something about either
is passed now, don't you think?

The only reason we haven't announced 1.4 is that mirrors take days to
upload all the software and we don't want to announce with most
mirrors not in sync yet.

> The simplest answer is to take
> the union filesystem out of the generic kernel, and add a comment saying
> "add this at your own risk - buggy".

I can add a note to LAST_MINUTE but that's the best that can be done
ex post facto.

> Most unexperienced users will leave things like the union (and null
> and umap) filesystems in their kernels, because they aren't aware of
> the known problems.

If you are running a NetBSD machine at an ISP, STRIP ANYTHING YOU
DON'T NEED OUT. This is a general rule. Bugs can only be exploited in
code you have in your kernel. If you don't need it, nuke it. Stuff
like lkms support should go if you don't absolutely need it, too.


Perry