Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sun, 28 Jan 2001 00:19:09 -0500
From:      "Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <allbery@ece.cmu.edu>
To:        james@m-a.net
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Buildworld failure using two disks
Message-ID:  <181490000.980659149@pyanfar.ece.cmu.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20010127220340.A294@dionysos.yi.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Saturday, January 27, 2001 22:03:40 -0700, Dionysos 
<dionysos@dionysos.yi.org> wrote:
+-----
| > ....but they cannot be created *on* msdos filesystems because the
| filesystem  > doesn't know about them.  Which, if I've been following
| this correctly, is  > what was happening.
| >
| You would definitely be following correctly.  Granted I didn't do any
| kind of scientific analysis of this to be sure that this was exactly what
| was tripping me up, but it makes a bit more sense that one can't write
| symbolic links across differently formatted file systems.
+---->8

You're not quite understanding.

Symlinks can point to anything; as far as the VFS is concerned, it's just a 
new filesystem path to follow.  The problem is that the msdos filesystem 
itself doesn't know how to store a filesystem object of type "symlink".  In 
fact, the semantics of the msdos filesystem are so different from those of 
Unix-style filesystems (ufs, ext2, etc.) that I would have expected more 
things to fail than just symlinking:  filenames which differ only in case 
will collide with each other, and it can't store any kind of filesystem 
object other than a regular file or a directory (i.e. not only do symlinks 
lose, so do fifos, sockets, and character and block devices... not that any 
of those would be put into /usr/obj.)

The lesson of this is:  don't put /usr/obj on a non-unix-like filesystem. 
ufs and ext2fs are the safe ones to use.

-- 
brandon s. allbery     [os/2][linux][solaris][japh]   allbery@kf8nh.apk.net
system administrator        [WAY too many hats]         allbery@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering                                   KF8NH
carnegie mellon university     ["better check the oblivious first" -ke6sls]



To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?181490000.980659149>