Re: A memory-based filesystem for the lazy [or impatient]

[Joshua Rosen]

Marcus Brinkmann writes:

> On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 03:51:34PM -0500, Roland McGrath wrote:
> > > On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 02:10:45AM -0500, Roland McGrath wrote:
> > > > If you are going to take that approach, i.e. a memory-based disk rather
> > > > than a memory-based filesystem, I would suggest adding a type to 
> > > > libstore.
> > > 
> > > But how do you format the store before it is used?
> > 
> > Just like any other, with mke2fs.
> > 
> >     settrans -c /dev/ramdisk /hurd/storeio -Tcopy zero:100M
> >     mke2fs /dev/ramdisk
> >     settrans -a /tmp /hurd/ext2fs /dev/ramdisk
> > 
> > It is true that there isn't a handy way to make:
> > 
> >     settrans -a /tmp /hurd/ext2fs -Tcopy zero:100M
> > 
> > do what you'd like.  This is unfortunate, since it is definitely better for
> > performance to have the store implementation in ext2fs's libstore rather
> > than in storeio's.
> 
> So what about a new weird store type, "run", with a command string as an
> argument:
> 
> settrans -a /tmp /hurd/ext2fs -T run 'mke2fs ${store}:copy:zero:100M'

Wouldn't it make more sense to put initialisation hooks into translators so
that you can have it (the ext2fs translator, here) run an arbitrary program
at startup (ie: mke2fs)?