Hurd translators for FreeBSD (was Re: Mount a tar archive?)

[cpghost at cordula.ws]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 11:40:55PM +0400, Andrew P. wrote:
> samba. It's a pity that FreeBSD doesn't have linuxish
> arcfs or tarmount, but that sort of thing is not really
> needed very often.

FWIW, the Hurd has a capability to attach a "translator"
anywhere on a file system. By "translator", they mean
a user land file system server. It's kind of mounting
a process instead of a device on an arbitrary mount
point. Actually, they borrowed and extended the idea
from BSD's portalfs!

If FreeBSD had something similar (e.g. by extending portalfs),
it would be quite easy to write a tarfs translator, at least
in read-only mode.

Of course, one could always write a kernel module for this the
classic Linux way, but it won't be so neat and flexible as a
user land application!

Regards,
-cpghost.

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