Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:48:07 -0800 (PST) From: Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org> To: rwatson@FreeBSD.org Cc: kientzle@acm.org Subject: Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar Message-ID: <200401142148.i0ELm77E040545@gw.catspoiler.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1040114142135.49872F-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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On 14 Jan, Robert Watson wrote: > On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote: > > ... > > All this generally sounds good. > >> LIBARCHIVE BACKGROUND >> >> As many of you know, I've been working on a project to overhaul the pkg >> tools. Among many other things, this requires a library that can >> read/write tar archives. This avoids the significant overhead imposed >> from forking a separate tar program. > > If you become a bored person requiring entertainment, it might be quite > interesting to create a read-only tarfs for use as a root file system > loaded in an md device. While there's a lot more to it than this, one of > the more irritating things about our current release build is that it > requires privilege so that it can chroot(), but also so it can manage md > devices and file system images. Just being able to use a tarball instead > of a UFS image would go a long way, although presumably require changes to > our loader as well. For work with diskless systems and network booting, > I'd much rather stick a tarball on an NFS server than create UFS images. > > I know NetBSD has a neat tool to create file systems from userspace > without privilege, but my understanding is that it has to pull in a lot of > code from the kernel in fairly messy ways. Since tar files are a well > supported portable format... :-) Why not use iso9660? The userland code already exists to create it and the file system code already exists to read it.
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