Re: [PATCH] Allow userspace block device implementation

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Mon Jul 27 2009 - 08:54:47 EST


On Sun, 2009-07-26 at 23:57 -1000, Zachary Amsden wrote:
> Well, it may be a good, bad, idiotic or brilliant idea depending on your
> personal philosophy. I went down this route out of pragmatism.
> Hopefully I have not fully re-invented the wheel.
>
> The patch included allows one to implement a kernel level block device
> in userspace, using an ioctl() based interface to create a sized device
> with given properties, and then receive and respond to bio requests
> issued to the device. One can poll on the associated control socket to
> allow efficient servicing of device requests. So far only strict copy
> to/from user memory is supported, there is no fancy page flipping or
> mapping operations.

Somehow this made me think of FUSE/CUSE... should this be named aBUSE?
Oh wait it is :-), what I'm after is I guess is, can we share some of
the FUSE/CUSE code?

I can only imagine the fun we'll end up with when someone tries swapon
on a user-space block device.. aptly named.

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