Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar

From: Robert Watson (rwatson_at_freebsd.org)
Date: 01/14/04

  • Next message: Vladimir Dozen: "Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar" 
    Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:24:46 -0500 (EST)
To: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>

    On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:

    ...

    All this generally sounds good.

    > LIBARCHIVE BACKGROUND
    >
    > As many of you know, I've been working on a project to overhaul the pkg
    > tools. Among many other things, this requires a library that can
    > read/write tar archives. This avoids the significant overhead imposed
    > from forking a separate tar program.

    If you become a bored person requiring entertainment, it might be quite
    interesting to create a read-only tarfs for use as a root file system
    loaded in an md device. While there's a lot more to it than this, one of
    the more irritating things about our current release build is that it
    requires privilege so that it can chroot(), but also so it can manage md
    devices and file system images. Just being able to use a tarball instead
    of a UFS image would go a long way, although presumably require changes to
    our loader as well. For work with diskless systems and network booting,
    I'd much rather stick a tarball on an NFS server than create UFS images.

    I know NetBSD has a neat tool to create file systems from userspace
    without privilege, but my understanding is that it has to pull in a lot of
    code from the kernel in fairly messy ways. Since tar files are a well
    supported portable format... :-)

    Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
    robert@fledge.watson.org Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research

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