Message-ID: <47B43138.40206@trashmail.net>
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:16:56 +0100
From: Mika Lawando <rzryyvzy@trashmail.net>
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To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Is there a "blackhole" /dev/null directory?
References: <20080214093051.7240852AB0E31@trashmail.net> <1202981957.10928.17.camel@phobos.jasper.bg>
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Jasper Bryant-Greene schrieb:
> On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 10:30 +0100, rzryyvzy wrote:
>   
>> /dev/null is often very useful, specially if programs force to save data in some file. But some programs like to creates different temporary file names, so /dev/null could no more work.
>>
>> What is with a "/dev/null"-directory?
>> I mean a "blackhole pseudo directory" which eats every write to null.
>>
>> Here is how it could work:
>> mount -t nulldir nulldir /dev/nulldir
>>
>> Now if a program does a create(2),
>> it creates in the memory the file with its fd.
>> Then if a program does a write(2) to the fd, it eats the writes and give out fakely it has written the number of bytes.
>> When the program calls does a close(2) of the fd, then the complete inode is deleted in the memory.
>>
>> The directory should  be permanently empty except for the inodes with open file descriptors. So only inode information would be temporary saved in this "nulldir tmpfs" directory.
>>
>> Is there already existing a possibility to create a null directory?
>>     
>
> This could be done fairly trivially with FUSE, and IMHO is a good use
> for FUSE because since you're just throwing most data away, performance
> is not a concern.
>   
Unfortunately performance is a concern because if not I would write on 
the hard disk the files, and then remove them with a cronjob.
But from the point of view of the time of developpment, FUSE is a good 
idea, because its possible to write a filesystem quickly in Perl.

-- 
Best regards,
Mika
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