Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code in userspace

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code in userspace

[Andries.Brouwer]

    From: Ben LaHaise <bcrl@redhat.com>

    3. Userspace partition code proposal

        Given the above two bits, here's a brief explaination of a
        proposal to move management of the partitioning scheme into
        userspace, along with portions of raid startup, lvm, uuid and
        mount by label code needed for mounting the root filesystem.

        Consider that the device node currently known as /dev/hda5 can
        also be viewed as /dev/hda at offset 512000 with a limit of 10GB.
        With the extensions in fs/block_dev.c, you could replace /dev/hda5
        with /dev/hda/offset=512000,limit=10240000000.  Now, by putting
        the partition parsing code into a libpart and binding mount to a
        libpart, the root filesystem mounting code can be run out of an
        initrd image.  The use of mount gives us the ability to mount
        filesystems by UUID, by label or other exotic schemes without
        having to add any additional code to the kernel.

    I'm going to stop writing this now.  I need sleep...

Hmm. You know that I wrote this long ago?
And that it has been part of the kernel for a long time?
And that there are user space utilities that use it?

In util-linux, look at the partx subdirectory.
In the kernel, read drivers/block/blkpg.c.

Andries

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code in userspace

[Andrew Morton]

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> 
> Hmm. You know that I wrote this long ago?

Well, let's not get too hung up on the disk thing (yeah,
I started it...).

Ben's intent here is to *demonstrate* how argv-style
info can be passed into device nodes.  It seems neat,
and nice.

We can also make use of a strong argument parsing library
in the kernel - there are a great number of open-coded
string bashing functions which could be rationalised
and regularised.


So.  When am I going to be able to:

	open("/bin/ls,-l,/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY);

?

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code in userspace

[Alexander Viro]

On Sat, 19 May 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:

> So.  When am I going to be able to:
> 
> 	open("/bin/ls,-l,/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY);

You are not. Think for a minute and you'll see why.

Linus' idea of /dev/tty/<parameters> is marginally sane - it makes sense
to consider that as configuring-upon-open. You _are_ going to do IO on
that file.

Ben's /dev/md0/<living_horror> is ugly - it's open just for side effects,
with no IO supposed to happen.

His idea of passing file descriptor instead of name makes these side effects
even messier.

The stuff you've proposed is a perversion worth of Albert. You've introduced
additional metacharacter into filenames, you will need some form of quoting
to be able to pass literal commas and you will need to quote slashes. It's
way past ugly.

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion codein userspace

[Andrew Morton]

Alexander Viro wrote:
> 
>  It's way past ugly.

I knew you'd like it.

It kind of makes sense, because it puts the two primary stream-of-bytes
objects in Unix into the same namespace, with the same accessors.
So if some random application is expecting a filename well heck, you
just give it a path-to-executable with args.  It won't care, although
it may have trouble lseek()ing on it.

It wasn't very serious at all.

-

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code in userspace

[Ben LaHaise]

On Sat, 19 May 2001, Alexander Viro wrote:

> Ben's /dev/md0/<living_horror> is ugly - it's open just for side effects,
> with no IO supposed to happen.

Now that I'm awake and refreshed, yeah, that's awful.  But
echo "hot-add,slot=5,device=/dev/sda" >/dev/md0/control *is* sane.  Heck,
the system can even send back result codes that way.

		-ben

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Alan Cox]

> Now that I'm awake and refreshed, yeah, that's awful.  But
> echo "hot-add,slot=5,device=/dev/sda" >/dev/md0/control *is* sane.  Heck,
> the system can even send back result codes that way.

Only to an English speaker. I suspect Quebec City canadians would prefer a
different command set.

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Alexander Viro]

On Sat, 19 May 2001, Alan Cox wrote:

> > Now that I'm awake and refreshed, yeah, that's awful.  But
> > echo "hot-add,slot=5,device=/dev/sda" >/dev/md0/control *is* sane.  Heck,
> > the system can even send back result codes that way.
> 
> Only to an English speaker. I suspect Quebec City canadians would prefer a
> different command set.

Alan, I'm not a native speaker and I had worked with system that got names
of utilities translated to Russian.

It's was hell. And I don't think that replacing compress (or пакуй) with
42A1769 would make it better.

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 05:25:22PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> Only to an English speaker. I suspect Quebec City canadians would prefer a
> different command set.

Should we support `pas387' as well as `no387' as a kernel boot parameter
then?  Face it, a sysadmin has to know the limited subset of english
which is used to configure a kernel.

-- 
Revolutions do not require corporate support.

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Sat, 19 May 2001, Alan Cox wrote:

> > Now that I'm awake and refreshed, yeah, that's awful.  But
> > echo "hot-add,slot=5,device=/dev/sda" >/dev/md0/control *is* sane.  Heck,
> > the system can even send back result codes that way.
>
> Only to an English speaker. I suspect Quebec City canadians would prefer a
> different command set.

Well...  Around here we've been used to Microsoft translations like:

ETES-VOUS CERTAIN [O/N] ?

... and of course pressing 'o' doesn't work while 'y' does.  :-)

Wanting to localize such low-level keywords is utopia.  Otherwise you'll
want to translate command names like free, rm, mv, etc. and yet programming
languages as well like C keywords.  And then you come to a point where
nothing could be interoperable any more.


Nicolas

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, 19 May 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > Now that I'm awake and refreshed, yeah, that's awful.  But
> > echo "hot-add,slot=5,device=/dev/sda" >/dev/md0/control *is* sane.  Heck,
> > the system can even send back result codes that way.
> 
> Only to an English speaker. I suspect Quebec City canadians would prefer a
> different command set.

I was waiting for the "anglo-saxon" argument.

I don't think it's a valid argument. You already have "/dev". You already
have english names for the numbers in ioctl's (and let's not be mentally
dishonest and say "numbers are cross-cultural", because NOBODY MUST EVER
USE THE RAW NUMBERS - you have to use the anglo-saxon #define'd names
because the numbers aren't even cross-platform on Linux, much less
portable to other systems).

So the "English is bad" argument is a complete non-argument.

		Linus

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Ingo Oeser]

On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 11:34:48AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
[Reasons]
> So the "English is bad" argument is a complete non-argument.

Jepp, I have to agree. 

English is used more or less as an communication protocol in
computer science and for operating computers.

Once you know how to operate an computer in English, you can
operate nearly every computer in the world, because they have
English as default locale.

Let's not repeat Babel please :-(

PS: English is neither mine, nor Linus native language. Why do
   the English natives complain instead of us? ;-)

<off topic side note>
   And be glad that's not German, that has this role. English
   sentences are WAY easier to parse by computers, because it
   doesn't use much suffixes and prefixes on words and has very
   few exceptions. Also these exceptions are eleminated from
   command languages WITHOUT influencing readability and
   comprehensability.
</off topic side note>


Regards

Ingo Oeser
-- 
To the systems programmer,
users and applications serve only to provide a test load.

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Alexander Viro]

On Sun, 20 May 2001, Ingo Oeser wrote:

> PS: English is neither mine, nor Linus native language. Why do
>    the English natives complain instead of us? ;-)

Because we had some experience with, erm, localized systems and for
Alan it's most likely pure theory? ;-)

				Al, still shuddering at the memories

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Alan Cox]

> On Sun, 20 May 2001, Ingo Oeser wrote:
> > PS: English is neither mine, nor Linus native language. Why do
> >    the English natives complain instead of us? ;-)
> 
> Because we had some experience with, erm, localized systems and for
> Alan it's most likely pure theory? ;-)

I think its important its considered. I do like the idea of a sensible ioctl
encoding (including ascii potentially) and being able to ship ioctls over the
network. 

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Padraig Brady]

Obviously there has to be some standard base
with which to work, especially for computer language
keywords as these can't be converted due to name
clashes. What would be cool is to pick a better base
language than English that everyone would have to
learn to "use computers". This is especially important
for opensource as it would greatly ease the operation
of the collective brain. Something easily parseable
would be an obvious criterion and would allow us
to interact with computers by voice(-recognition)
with no ambiguity, etc. etc...
tada: http://www.lojban.org/

will everything be changed over in the 2.5 timeframe? :-)

Padraig.

Ingo Oeser wrote:

>On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 11:34:48AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>[Reasons]
>
>>So the "English is bad" argument is a complete non-argument.
>>
>
>Jepp, I have to agree. 
>
>English is used more or less as an communication protocol in
>computer science and for operating computers.
>
>Once you know how to operate an computer in English, you can
>operate nearly every computer in the world, because they have
>English as default locale.
>
>Let's not repeat Babel please :-(
>
>PS: English is neither mine, nor Linus native language. Why do
>   the English natives complain instead of us? ;-)
>
><off topic side note>
>   And be glad that's not German, that has this role. English
>   sentences are WAY easier to parse by computers, because it
>   doesn't use much suffixes and prefixes on words and has very
>   few exceptions. Also these exceptions are eleminated from
>   command languages WITHOUT influencing readability and
>   comprehensability.
></off topic side note>
>
>
>Regards
>
>Ingo Oeser
>

Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> > Now that I'm awake and refreshed, yeah, that's awful.  But
> > echo "hot-add,slot=5,device=/dev/sda" >/dev/md0/control *is* sane.  Heck,
> > the system can even send back result codes that way.
> 
> Only to an English speaker. I suspect Quebec City canadians would prefer a
> different command set.

Alan, bad idea.

This is less evil than magic numbers, and *users* should not be
touching this anyway. They should have nice gui tools that do it for
them.

English is *way* better than magic numbers. It makes sense at least
for someone.
								    Pavel 

-- 
I'm pavel@ucw.cz. "In my country we have almost anarchy and I don't care."
Panos Katsaloulis describing me w.r.t. patents at discuss@linmodems.org