[RFC] mount can figure out fstype automatically

[Wesley Morgan]

On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Craig Rodrigues wrote:

> Hi,
>
> One of the pet peeves I have with FreeBSD is that
> if I have a device with a local filesystem that I want to mount,
> I need to explicitly know what type of filesystem is on the
> device in order to mount it from the command-line.
>
> For example,
>
> mount -t cd9660
> mount -t udf
> mount -t ext2fs
> mount -t msdosfs
>
> Where this is particularly annoying is if I have multiple
> USB thumb drives with different filesystems on them.

How ironic. I was toying around with this idea enough this week to look 
over the mount source code. However, I was thinking along a completely 
different line. A better path seemed, to me, to be to try to use GEOM 
label as your data source. If the device path was "/dev/msdosfs/USBKEY", 
infer that it should use the appropriate driver. The only major 
requirement would be that everyone label their filesystems, or perhaps the 
geom label class could be expanded to include label-less filesystems in a 
sequential manner like "/dev/ufs/nolabel1".

This method seemed to be the simplest and pretty much required no extra 
kernel interfaces, just a solid geom label class.


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