(Recipients trimmed, as this is a major change of topic...)
[big cut]
> Actually, I think /etc/mtab is not needed at all.
This is already mostly correct, AFAIK.
My embedded system uses "busybox" for mount and umount, /etc/mtab
does not exist, and the root file system is readonly.
But if I do "umount -a" it works. So the busybox umount is already
reading /proc/mounts.
The only oddity I see with using /proc/mounts is that it shows:
/dev/root / ext2 rw 0 0
instead of
/dev/hda1 / ext2 rw 0 0
but this doesn't seem to cause any problems... even though /dev/root
does not exist (!)
In fact, the "mount" man page on my Mandrake 7.2 system says:
"It is possible to replace /etc/mtab by a symbolic link to
/proc/mounts..." and then goes on to describe some of the issues and
problems with doing so - loopback, and paths with spaces seem to
be the significant ones.
Hopefully those problems can and will be solved soon, and then
we can get rid of /etc/mtab completely, and keep the root partition
read only almost all the time.
Torrey Hoffman
On Mon, Mar 19, 2001 at 03:05:55PM -0800, Torrey Hoffman wrote:
> In fact, the "mount" man page on my Mandrake 7.2 system says:
>
> "It is possible to replace /etc/mtab by a symbolic link to
> /proc/mounts..." and then goes on to describe some of the issues and
> problems with doing so - loopback, and paths with spaces seem to
> be the significant ones.
The spaces part was fixed in patch-2.4.0-test7.
Today there is a different flaw again:
After "mount --bind somedir mountpoint" there is no
indication of somedir in /proc/mounts.
Andries