Re: Getcwd?

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 11:43:40PM +0100, Oystein Viggen wrote:
> Marcus Brinkmann wrote: 
> 
> > Well, moving things into a seperate usr might or might not work, it is not
> > the intention and you should have said it in the first mail that you did
> > something unusual. It is likely that it will not work right without some
> > adjustments, but I wouldn't expect getcwd to fail.
> 
> Why should we not have a separate /usr?  Especially with the filesystem
> size limits we have on the hurd, I would think putting /usr on its own
> partition should be a natural choice?  

We will have a better concept to distribute the content of the filesystem
among several partitions. /usr is an ancient idea, when we had a tape you
used to boot the system with (and load it into core memory), and a tape with
the rest of the filesystem. After booting, you would switch the tapes.

The better concept will be to shadow filesystems in one tree, similar to
unionfs on BSD.

> I'm currently running with only one big partition (the old /usr ;) and
> swap.  Could I for example put /var on its own file system without
> mysterious things happening?

Of course. You can put whatever you want on the filesystem, and use symlinks
to glue it in. But removing the /usr symlink will result in libraries ending
up in /usr/lib without being in /lib, and you will need to set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH early then, so the linker can find them.

There might be other problems.

> > The ftpfs stuff sounds more likely, but a reboot should have fixed that. If
> > after a reboot getcwd doesn't work, and you didn't install ftpfs in some
> > unusual place, I wouldn't expect any problem either.
> 
> It seemed to me that the system "remembered" the set translator over
> boots.  It surely tends to remember remember my network config.  

Yeah, but when rebooting, the system has not started up ftpfs yet, because
you have not accessed /sunsite. Any error involving ftpfs can only show up
after ftpfs runs.
 
> Are there any design documents for hurd (and debian hurd) available, so
> that a newbie like me could learn the ropes without bothering the list
> with every minor nit?

There is the paper "A new strategy towards OS design" by Thomas. There is
also an article in German I wrote for FreeX, I think it is available on
their homepage as pdf. And maybe I will put my talk online.

> > How did you set up the ftpfs directory?
> 
> After the reformat, I do not have the .bash_history available, but it
> was something like this:
> 
> settrans -c /sunsite /hurd/ftpfs sunsite.uio.no:/
> (/sunsite did not exist before the settrans, but was created)
> 
> It's probably wrong in some obvious way, as /hurd/ftpfs --help was not
> the easiest help I have read...  :)

No, it is just fine. You can try "settrans -c /ftp /hurd/hostmux /hurd/ftpfs" 
for some extra coolness. (And access /ftp/sunsite.uio.no etc).

> > There is -fg (force goaway), and then there is kill and kill -9.
> 
> I didn't try -fg, only -g, but neither kill nor kill -9 seemed to bother
> the storeio.

Please be more specific. I thought you were trying to kill ftpfs, which is
not store based. storeio on device files are seperate processes which can be
killed, too (if you are meaning the CD ROM lock, I am working on a patch to
make it work right).

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de