Star Network Transparency and the Multi-Root Filesystem
Linked by Will Varfar on Tue 3rd Aug 2004 05:32 UTC
Internet & Networking This article offers feature suggestions to budding OS developers looking for that neat edge.
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GNU/Hurd's way of doing it
by Nicolas Centa on Tue 3rd Aug 2004 08:05 UTC

Yes, you can do it with user space libraries, but a lot of program won't use them or will use different ones, and it is another layer on top of the OS which already has a VFS system.

I think the article is too simplistic. With the file utils we have :

(nicolas@Thor2, 1) ~ $ mkdir http:
(nicolas@Thor2, 2) ~ $ mkdir http://www.google.com
(nicolas@Thor2, 3) ~ $ cd http://www.google.com
(nicolas@Thor2, 4) ~/http:/www.google.com $

So if you want to support these kind of names, you have to change basically everything.

LUFS is some kind of user space / kernel space mix which does not work very well and can introduce several bugs and security holes. I don't like it, I think it's not the right way to solve the problem which is deeper than something we can do with a kernel module.

I agree with the comment which says that Plan9 does it very well. But I thinks Plan9 has other drawbacks. Basically, Plan9 does not seem to be source compatible with GNU/Linux.

So there is another OS which does it well : GNU/Hurd (for the user it works basically as explained for Plan9, if we stay in the VFS part), and one of it's implicit goals is to be source compatible with GNU/Linux (the distribution is Debian, the libc is GNU's, currently even drivers are Linux's). So every program which runs on GNU/Linux could take advantage of this kind of virtual file system.