The "bdev" library provides basic primitives for file systems to talk
to block device drivers, hiding the details of the underlying protocol
and interaction model.
This version of libbdev is rather basic. It is planned to support the
following features in the long run:
- asynchronous requests and replies;
- recovery support for underlying block drivers;
- retrying of failed I/O requests.
The commit also changes our block-based file systems (mfs, ext2, isofs)
to make use of libbdev.
- Remove unused includes.
- Add include guards to headers.
- Use unsigned variables in case they're never going to hold a negative
value. This causes GCC's complaints to disappear and should make flexelint
a lot happier, too.
- Make functions private when they're used only within a module.
- Remove unused variables.
- Add casts where appropriate.
- Revise VFS-FS protocol and update VFS/MFS/ISOFS accordingly.
- Clean up MFS by removing old, dead code (backwards compatibility is broken by
the new VFS-FS protocol, anyway) and rewrite other parts. Also, make sure all
functions have proper banners and prototypes.
- VFS should always provide a (syntactically) valid path to the FS; no need for
the FS to do sanity checks when leaving/entering mount points.
- Fix several bugs in MFS:
- Several path lookup bugs in MFS.
- A link can be too big for the path buffer.
- A mountpoint can become inaccessible when the creation of a new inode
fails, because the inode already exists and is a mountpoint.
- Introduce support for supplemental groups.
- Add test 46 to test supplemental group functionality (and removed obsolete
suppl. tests from test 2).
- Clean up VFS (not everything is done yet).
- ISOFS now opens device read-only. This makes the -r flag in the mount command
unnecessary (but will still report to be mounted read-write).
- Introduce PipeFS. PipeFS is a new FS that handles all anonymous and
named pipes. However, named pipes still reside on the (M)FS, as they are part
of the file system on disk. To make this work VFS now has a concept of
'mapped' inodes, which causes read, write, truncate and stat requests to be
redirected to the mapped FS, and all other requests to the original FS.
- Changed VFS-FS protocol to only store OK or negative error code in
m_type field of reply messages.
- Changed VFS to treat nonzero positive replies from FS as requests.
- Added backwards compatibility to VFS and MFS.
No protection of global data structures is provided in VFS, so many
VFS calls cannot be made safely by FS servers during many FS calls.
Use with caution (or, preferably, not at all).
