Re: [PATCH] Allow NBD to be used locally

["Kyle Moffett" <kyle@moffetthome.net>]

Whoops, only hit "Reply" on the first email, sorry Jan.

On Feb 2, 2008 7:54 PM, Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@computergmbh.de> wrote:
> On Feb 2 2008 18:31, devzero@web.de wrote:
> >
> >> How will that work? Fuse makes up a filesystem - not helpful
> >> if you have a raw disk without a known fs to mount.
> >
> >take zfs-fuse or ntfs-3g for example.
> >you have a blockdevice or backing-file containing data structures and fuse makes those show up as a filesystem.
> >i think vmware-mount is not different here.
>
> vmware-mount IS different, it provides the _block_ device,
> which is then mounted through the usual mount(2) mechanism
> (if there is a filesystem driver for it).

As far as I can tell, vmware-mount should be re-implemented as a
little perl script around "dmsetup" and/or "losetup", possibly with
"dm-userspace" patched into the kernel to allow you to handle
non-mapped blocks in your userspace daemon when somebody tries to
access them.  If you don't need that ability then straight dm-loop and
dm-linear will work.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett