[RFC] Teaching mount(8) to use nmount()

[Doug Rabson]

On Sunday 09 October 2005 16:04, Craig Rodrigues wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 03:12:53PM +0200, Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote:
> > Can't we just check if there is an external binary in
> > _PATH_SYSPATH? It'll be easier to add new file system then (there
> > will be no need to change this function).
>
> We could do that.  I had some thoughts on this:
> -> In the future, we want to make it difficult for people to add new
>    external mount programs and force them to put the majority
>    of their argument parsing inside the FS, so that it works
>    nicely with nmount() and mount -t.
>    Only in exceptional circumstances should we have an external
>    mount program that works with mount -t....NFS and SMBFS are two
>    special cases I could think of, and in these special cases
>    (and new special cases), we could modify mount(8).

The mount program isn't always just doing argument parsing. For 
instance, the Darwin webdav filesystem puts all the HTTP protocol code 
in the mount program and uses IPC from the kernel to make i/o requests 
etc. as needed.

I'm sure there must be other examples but the only one I can think of 
right now is the ancient broken kerberos auth code in NFS.