Variant symlinks?

Variant symlinks?

Posted Jul 20, 2005 6:26 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
Parent article: Kernel Summit 2005: Virtual filesystem topics

I'm still hoping to see variant symlinks, as in Apollo Aegis and, lately, Dragonfly BSD. In a variant symlink, if the link text is "$(HOME)/bin", it really points into your home directory. For safety and backward compatibility, a process (or process group) would need to set a mode to request such expansion before it would occur, and (not incidentally) identify the environment to use.

And how about an analog to NetBSD's UVM zero-copy read and write semantics? In UVM, writes from and reads into buffers aligned to page boundaries are automatically zero-copy operations. On NetBSD, sendfile() can be implemented as an ordinary library function. Of course this affects more than just the VFS.

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