On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 09:22:19PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 01:06:02PM -0600, Scott Long wrote: > > So in your opinion and experience, what are the pros and cons of > > maintaining a table of magic numbers? > > The feature is imensely useful. The implementation won't win any > points for a clean design but works very well in practice. I think > it's definitly better than probing in the kernel because letting a filesystem > driver try to make sense of something that's not it's own format can > lead to all kinds of funnies. Linux does this (iterating all filesystem > types in kernel) for the special case of the root filesystem where mount(8) > is not available, and it showeds various interesting bugs at least in the > fat driver. It also (the root filesystem special case) has a tendency to give misleading error messages which cost me a number of lost hours and grey hairs in my previous job. -- Greg Lewis Email : glewis_at_eyesbeyond.com Eyes Beyond Web : http://www.eyesbeyond.com Information Technology FreeBSD : glewis_at_FreeBSD.orgReceived on Tue Jul 11 2006 - 18:09:57 UTC
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