OMFS and the value of obscure filesystems [LWN.net]

OMFS and the value of obscure filesystems

Posted Apr 18, 2008 0:53 UTC (Fri) by dale77 (subscriber, #1490)
Parent article: OMFS and the value of obscure filesystems

I agree with Andrew. Something new with such few users should be in user space.

How do you ensure you have no bugs in your code? Have no code! Of course we need code for
useful things. But OMFS sounds like it does not meet the useful criterion. In the spirit of
code-minimization, adding code of such limited utility to the maintained code base sounds
silly to me.

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OMFS and the value of obscure filesystems

Posted Apr 18, 2008 2:26 UTC (Fri) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link]

It's hard to justify not bringing in OMFS when I know for a fact that there's  code for
prototype hardware boards *that never saw production* in the mainline.  Code for which there
were under 6 boards made. ever. Suddenly 20 guys using OMFS sounds like quite the crowd!

Hardware driver bias

Posted Apr 18, 2008 9:43 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I don't see the difference between a file system driver for obscure hardware and a chip driver
for obscure hardware.   They've been hyping how easy it is to get a well-enough-written chip
driver into the kernel.  Resistance here appears to sully that message.  

That said, there seems to be a lot of effort to divert USB hardware drivers to user-space
libraries, which is probably all to the good. I suppose the difference is that FUSE is not the
standard installation that USB libraries and the generic drivers they depend upon are.  Fixing
that is a job for the distributions.

USB drivers to userspace

Posted Aug 3, 2008 10:20 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

That move does exist, but only for devices with no concurrent uses and no established kernel
interface -- scanners, for example.

It's not limited to USB either; the Firewire DV driver was likewise deprecated.