Some musings. Lets take NFS as an example, because a lot of this seems to revolve around issues with distributed filesystems. What's the logical way to configure the thing when we have multiple servers and multiple mounts per server? I'd think having two levels would make sense: 1) configure a connection (IP address, protocol, options) 2) mount instances of this connection into the tree This doesn't fit the current /etc/fstab model: the information currently contained therein would be split into two distinct sources, e.g.: /etc/fs-conn: foo { type=nfs, vers=4, address = nfs.foo.com, rsize=8192, wsize=1048576, }; bar { type=nfs, vers=3, address = nfs.bar.com, }; /etc/fs-mounts: foo /one /mnt/foo/one nosuid,nodev,ro foo /two /mnt/foo/two defaults bar / /mnt/bar noatime This closely matches what the kernel currently does (each entry in fs-conn will create a super block, each entry in fs-mounts will create a mount), except a certain amount of mind reading by the kernel is replaced with explicit configuration. So how can this be presented on the new API? Simple: just make fs_context be nameable and persistent. Where that name resides (i.e. which namespace) is a good question, that I don't have an answer to. Perhaps Eric... Thoughts? Thanks, Miklos