I looked at the ". root" idea as an IOCTL method, and already came to
the conclusion this would not work because you need a mounted volume
present or you cannot talk to the driver. The Caldera Netware NDS
Client does something very similiar an uses a dummy device driver to
pass IOCTL's back and forth from the kernel, but they have an ugly
script in rc.d that checks if the dummy device is present, deletes it,
re-creates it, then opens it. If this is all there is to call IOCTL's
in the FS driver, then the Linux version of NWFS will be inferior to the
versions on NT/2000. This also means I have to write an RPM file that
will do this and hack up the users scripts. Having a simple binary
driver (like Windows 2000 let's me have) is preferable becuase it makes
it easy to support....
Huh? A typical windows application install requires dozens of registry
entries, which if they had to be done by hand, would be a support
disaster. That's why you have installers under Windows. And similarly,
that's why Linux systems have package management systems such as RPM.
Another method you can do is to have your filesystem register a sysctl,
and then you can read and write messages to your filesystem through
/proc/sys/fs/nwfs/....
- Ted
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