Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Am Donnerstag, den 26.08.2004, 14:16 +0200 schrieb Andrea Arcangeli:

quoted

Currently plugins are not modules. It just means that there's a defined
interface between the reiser4 core and the plugins. Just like you could
see filesystems as "VFS plugins".

but filesystems are exactly always modules (in precompiled kernels at
least).

Yes, of cousre.

Anyways I don't see any visible EXPORT_SYMBOL in reiser4.

Yes, there's no module infrastructure there. These "plugins" need to be
linked at compile time. Some plugins need to be anyway since the the
filesystem is useless without them. Others whould be optional features.

quoted

In fact, reiser4 plugins are
- users of the reiser4 core API
- some of them are implementing Linux VFS methods (thus being some sort
of glue code between the Reiser4 storage tree and the Linux VFS)

then it seems a bit misleading to call those things plugins.

As you wrote those are "users of the reiser4 core API", with plugins I
always meant dynamically loadable things, like plugins for web browers
(hence kernel modules in kernel space). While here apparently you can't
plugin anything at runtime, it's just code that uses the reiser4 core
API that can be modified with a kernel patch as usual.

Right. The name is probably at bit misleading. But assuming the
compression "plugin" whould be dynamically loadable at some later point
it would be a plugin then?