[RFC] mount can figure out fstype automatically

[Christoph Hellwig]

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.