Re: reiser4 in GRUB

[Vitaly Fertman]

On Tuesday 05 October 2004 01:22, Marco Gerards wrote:
> Vitaly Fertman <address@hidden> writes:
> >> Reiserfs[34] support for GRUB 2 is quite high on my todo list.  But I am
> >> a bit worried about reiser4.  As far as I know it has plugins and I
> >> wonder if I also have to implement all plugins too and how much work
> >> it will be to maintain this.
> >
> > all plugins are implemented in reiser4 library which is the part of
> > reiser4progs. the patch will only call a pair of library methods.
> >
> >> I hope someone can tell me what would be the amount of work is to
> >> implement and maintain such reiserfs 4 implementation, for example
> >> compared to the complexity of other filesystems.
> >
> > probably even simplier as all internal stuff is implemented in the
> > reiser4 library itself. you can have a look at the current reiser4
> > support patch for grub for details:
> > ftp://ftp.namesys.com/pub/reiser4progs/grub/
>
> My first concern about this is that this library is way to big for
> GRUB 2.  The issues for GRUB 2 are different from those of GRUB
> Legacy.
>
> Second the library does have stuff like memory management, etc IIRC.
> What I remember of it, it is pretty bloated.  Or am I mistaken about
> this?

the library deal with the memory through the defined interface, usual 
libc malloc/free methods are called usually. to allow it to work in the 
environement when libc is not available, there is a trivial memory 
manager implemented, so nothing needs to be changed in the library inself. 

> Personally I do not like the idea to use an external library to add a
> filesystem to GRUB 2.  I wonder what the opinion of other GRUB 2
> developers is about this.

one of the most important point here is that the number of plugins is 
not fixed, it will be grow with time changing evth icluding the disk 
format and it will be much simplier to maintain it all in one place -- 
the reiser4 library.

> But this did not answer my question about complexity of reiserfs 4.
> But I will have a look at it and see what I can do for GRUB 2.
>
> As for GRUB Legacy, that is not up to me.
>
> Thanks,
> Marco

-- 
Thanks,
Vitaly Fertman