Hello, I'd like to discuss an idea to create an umbrella library for file system user space utilities mainly fsck and mkfs. The reason for this is that the current state where the application trying to create/manipulate the file systems needs to use file system binaries itself and the parse output which is not pretty nor viable in the long run. We rally need libraries for the applications to use them and since fsck, mkfs and tools to retrieve various specific information from the file systems have lots in common across the different file system the 'umbrella' library could provide all the common operation. I guess that the trick here would be to make it generic enough to cover possibly any linux file system, however still make it interesting and usable. The other think I would like to talk about with the rest of the ext4 crew and possibly other file system people is the amount of mount options/features file systems support. There is the problem with interoperability between various file system features which is not usually very well documented or untested, not talking about the fact that some combination are never tested. We should discuss common practices when adding new file system features/mount options to avoid such problem in general and the possibility of removing mount options without breaking user setups. Last but not least there is the idea of extent locking which has already been poked at several times by several people. I think that this is a perfect time to discuss the generic file system independent design of extent/range locking mechanism. Jan Kara already have a proposal for this topic (Mapping range locking) and it seems that Zheng Liu is working on the same thing for ext4. Thanks! -Lukas -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
