[open-vm-tools-devel] Use of the vmblock driver

[Anthony L. <an...@co...>]

Hi,

I'm going through the vm-tools code now and I think I'm starting to get 
my head around them.  The one bit that still puzzles me is why the 
"vmblock" driver is needed.  I see that it is only used for DnD and 
copy/paste of a file.

As far as I can tell, vmblock implements a mandatory file locking that 
is guaranteed to work on any filesystem.  I can understand why one might 
want to do this in general but I can't seem to figure out a reason why 
DnD or copy/paste is special here verses any other application.

Am I correct in assuming that this could be changed to doing posix 
advisory locking and for filesystems that don't support it, just live 
with the potential race conditions?

If my understanding of vmblock is correct, I strongly doubt it would be 
well received on LKML which is why I ask about alternatives :-)

Regards,

Anthony Liguori