[uml-devel] Re: root on non-block filesystems

[Henrik N. <hn...@ma...>]

Jeff Dike wrote:

> As far as I'm concerned, the right way would be to do the following:
>         register a "root_hostfs" filesystem with a read_super that recognizes a
> superblock that says "hostfs"
>         change the ubd driver to have it produce that fake superblock, by having it
> recognize that the file it was given is a directory (i.e.
> ubd0=/path/to/hostfs/root), and putting something like
> "HOSTFS:/path/to/hostfs/root" in the buffers passed in to contain the
> superblock
>         the hostfs_root_read_super proc recognizes the "HOSTFS:/path/to/hostfs/root",
> extracts the directory and does the same thing as the current read_super with
> it, and says "I own this fs"

What about the following approach:

Replace the NFS hack with a generic framework of handling non-blockdevice oriented root
filesystems, registered "in parallell" to register_filesystem() (for example by
register_rootcapable_filesystem() ). This list gets automatically destroyed when a
suitable root fs has been found.

/Henrik