I happened to read up on KT about the "Linus on devfs" issue and
I remembered that Jacques Gelinas' VirtualFS does some of what
Linus wants and could easily be extended to do the rest. It's
all in user-space and it's all configured with text files ;)
OK, the naming is confusing. Jacques' VirtualFS has nothing
to do with the fact that there is a virtual FS in the kernel.
That said, VirtualFS enables the following:
# Simple access to the floppy and cdrom
# No mount/umount required
cd
ls n/a:
ls n/cdrom
# Browsing printers and print queue
ls n/printers
ls n/printers/lp
# Removing a job from the print queue of the "lp" printer
rm n/printers/lp/60
# browsing windows and samba servers
# Getting the workgroup list
ls n/browse
# Getting the workgroup members
ls n/browse/group
# Getting the share published by a server
ls n/browse/group/server
# Accessing a share (A popup will require the password)
ls n/browse/group/server/share
It will even enable you to access the floppy and the CDROM on an
X-terminal (Jacques' favorites :)
This is all done in user-space remember (some LD_PRELOADs are used
with some modifs to glibc).
You can get Jacques' VirtualFS from it's home page:
http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/virtualfs/
There isn't much doc on the page itself, but if you go to the dowloads
section and get the source code, you'll find a doc/ directory containing
some html pages explaining the details of what it can do.
Just thought some of you would like to know ...
Cheers.
Karim
P.S.: The reason I post this is that I know Jacques hasn't done
much publicity for VirtualFS and it isn't on freshmeat, so few people
know about this even though it has a lot of potential.
(I know about this because I was there when he presented it at the
linux-quebec LUG and had the pleasure to discuss it with him in detail.)
===================================================
Karim Yaghmour
karym@opersys.com
Operating System Consultant
(Linux kernel, real-time and distributed systems)
===================================================
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