Re: Mad idea: grub-fuse

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/9/7 Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden>:
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Colin Watson<address@hidden> wrote:
>> os-prober mounts filesystems using Linux's filesystem drivers. This of
>> course means that we have to go to special lengths to avoid replaying
>> journals (we don't yet, but we should), we have to load huge piles of
>> filesystem modules, etc.
>>
>> Today's crazy idea was to implement a FUSE wrapper for grub-fstest,
>> thereby providing a read-only filesystem mount using GRUB's filesystem
>> drivers. There would be lots of things you probably wouldn't be able to
>> do this way, but it would be enough to support os-prober (which could of
>> course only use this optionally, but even so).
>>
>> I can't decide whether or not this is a terrible idea, so I'm sending
>> mail in case somebody thinks it's a good idea and wants to run with it.
>> :-)
>>
> Actually I had this idea before but haven't had any time to implement
> or think more about it. This would be useful for massive multi-OS
> environment since fuse is available on many platforms but many of FS
> drivers aren't. Implementing fuse wrapper for grub fs drivers is
> useful. However I'm not sure if it should go to main repository - this
> project isn't really about booting. I think that it's useful but
> should be a separate "spin-off" project

Since we want grub use this module and at this point in time the FUSE
interface is more stable than grub interfaces I think it would be more
natural to start developing this kind of module with GRUB unless there
are some license issues. After all, grub includes other tools that are
meant for running outside of GRUB. The question remains who (if
anybody at all) writes the wrapper.

Thanks

Michal