RE: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 1/2] libfsimage

["Ian Pratt" <m+Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 19:58 +0100, John Levon wrote:
> > These two patches re-work pygrub to use a generic C library for 
> > reading filesystem images. An immediate benefit is that there's no 
> > longer any external dependencies, so all the filesystems 
> always 'just work'.
> 
> The downside is that it no longer picks up updates, fixes 
> etc. from the official upstream support for libext2fs / 
> libreiserfs, so we're just duplicating the places where 
> filesystem support needs to be maintained.

[Apparently, libresierfs is moribund and doesn't actually support
current v3 filesystems anyhow. We need to look at other ways of pulling
kernels out.]

As I understand it, John's scheme doesn't necessarily prevent using the
existing libraries -- you could have external binaries linked against
the existing libraries, or you could choose to statically link if your
distro didn't normally include those libraries.

Ian

> If xen packages are properly built, filesystems will Just Work anyway.
> 
> > Slightly longer term, providing a stable C API for 
> filesystem support 
> > adds a considerable amount of future proofing.
> 
> That I can agree with.  But I'd rather see that API done as a 
> wrapper around existing upstream filesystem libraries, rather 
> than forking fs userspace support entirely.


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