Re: userland|unprivileged file system handling tools

Luigi Rizzo wrote:

>We seem to lack tools that allow the generation/handling of file
>system images without root privs. The 'standard techniques' used
>to build the bootable floppies rely on vnconfig/mdconfig, disklabel,
>fsck and mknod which all must run as root.
>
>Colin Percival pointed me to ports/sysutils/makefs which builds an
>almost correct fs image -- it has a couple of bugs, one which is
>trivially fixed, the other one which could be cured by a pass of
>fsck. There is still the issue of creating a label for the image
>(which right now i do using a small C program), and handling device
>nodes (not an issue on 5.x, but this could be possibly fixed with
>some makefs extension).
>
>So:
>
>  + is there interest in having makefs become part of the
>    standard system, instead of a port ?
>  
>  + how hard would it be to teach disklabel and fsck to
>    work on files (filesystem images) as well as devices ?
>
>  
>

I'd be interested in those tools, and I'm sure they would be very 
helpful for those of use building small embedded-like devices.  I was 
very happy with the discovery of makefs, and I'd love to see it (or 
something like it) in the standard system, along with the supporting 
other tools.  I'd help, but I'm not much of a C coder at this point. :)  
I can test though.

Eric


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Eric Anderson     Sr. Systems Administrator    Centaur Technology
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
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