To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Subject: Re: [autofs] [RFC] Towards a Modern Autofs
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 09:55:39 -0800
Organization: Zytor Communications
Message-ID: <3FFC481B.5030905@zytor.com>
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Mike Waychison wrote:

> This is clearly not 'all of userspace'.  Autofs is an exception.  As is 
> /etc/mtab.  The way I see it, automounting is a 'mount facility', as are 
> namespaces.  The two should be made to work together.  Yes, mount(8) 
> should probably be fixed one way or another as well due to /etc/mtab 
> breakage. Why? Because it too is a mount facility.
> 
> There are a couple problems inherent with namespaces.  Most of these are 
> mount facilities that are broken such as mentioned above.  They *should* 
> be fixed to work nicely.

For that one needs to know how the namespaces are used, not just how 
they are implemented.  There was a long discussion on this on #kernel 
yesterday, by the way.

> Other parts of userspace get confused with namespaces, eg: cron and atd. 
>  These programs clearly need infrastructure added that somehow allows 
> for arbitrary namespace joining/saving.  If you have suggestions for how 
> we can solve this issue, please do let me know.  I'm stumped :\  I'd be 
> more than happy to discuss this with you.

Do they?  In order for that to be a "clearly", I believe one needs to 
understand how namespaces are used in practice.  It may not be desirable 
or even possible; this starts getting into a policy decision.

> One not-so-far fetched approach would be to associate cron/at jobs with 
> automount configurations so that a namespace can be re-constructed at 
> runtime.

I am not entirely sure what you mean with this, but it sounds incredibly 
dangerous to me.

	-hpa

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