[RFC] mount can figure out fstype automatically
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Tue Jul 11 11:45:20 UTC 2006
On Mon, 10 Jul 2006, 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.
In both FreeBSD and Darwin, I've noticed that the kernel msdosfs code is
excessively permissive as to what it considers a FAT file system. This is
presumably necessary due to the enourmous diversity of FAT file systems
floating around, but it makes it a little too easy to cause msdos to trip over
layouts that violate its layout assumptions. :-) FAT is much more reliably
detected by looking at the partition type it lives in than by looking at the
bytes that appear inside the partition, I believe.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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