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Re: Get rid of /etc/mtab ?



Bernd Eckenfels <lists@lina.inka.de> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 12:02:53PM +0200, Goswin Brederlow wrote:
> > Can someone summarise the reasons against
> > 
> > ln -s /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
> > 
> > for me please? Only Problem I know for that solution are loopback
> > filesystems and that could be worked out.
> 
> There are:
> 
> - /proc/mount does not contain the root device, but "mount" can transform
> /dev/root into the current root device itself

/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 / ext3 rw 0 0

Always(?) the first entry.

> - bind mounts are listed wrong:
> mtab: /var/cache/apt/archives /var/www/deb-archive/debian none rw,bind 0 0
> mount: /dev/hda6 /var/www/deb-archive/debian ext3 rw 0 0

As in my other mail: Does the kernel know about the bind option or is
that mount intern?

Does anything go wrong without the bind option? mount -oremount maybe?

> - loopback mounts are broken
> mtab: /mnt/hdb/31/cdimages/potato1.iso /mnt/iso/potato1 iso9660
> ro,loop=/dev/loop0 0 0
> mounts: /dev/loop0 /mnt/iso/potato1 iso9660 ro 0 0

That is probably the hardest to fix since mount realy only mounts the
loopback device. Somehow the kernel would have to notice or be told
that mount does the losetup and not the user.

> - Diskquota quota options are not reflected

Again, does anything break there? Never used quotas so I couldn't
tell. I gues the kernel does now about the quotas options, otherwise
quotas wouldn't work, right? So they could be shown in /proc/mounts
with some additional code when generating the file?
 
> Most of those options can be easyly fixed in kernel space, some others will
> not affect most users.
> 
> My oppinion is, we should support the link if somebody feels like it will
> work. In fact, we should support read only root.

It works. I use(d) it on several maschines. I only stoped using it
when I started building boot-floppies on my Alpha, because it wouldn't
free the loopback devices upon umount.

MfG
        Goswin


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