Subject: Re: Multiboot support for review
To: Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>
From: Pavel Cahyna <pavel.cahyna@st.mff.cuni.cz>
List: tech-kern
Date: 02/04/2006 23:34:14
On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 09:19:21PM +0100, Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
> Here come some things I'd like to discuss:
> 
> - In the past days, someone suggested the idea of adding a textual
>   data representation to pass variable/value pairs between the kernel
>   and userspace.  I've had to do something similar to pass some boot
>   information between GRUB and the kernel, and hence implemented such
>   an interface.
> 
>   It is currently very, very simple, but it may do the job in the
>   cases where it's needed (e.g., mount(2) arguments).
> 
>   It is named 'optstr' and is implemented in sys/optstr.h and
>   kern/subr_optstr.c.  See the manual page in the patch file.

While I like to see Multiboot support coming, I don't think that using
optstr (or any other text-based mechanism) for mount(2) is a good idea.
Text-based formats have the disadvantage of not allowing some arbitrary
characters (in this case, spaces), without some quoting mechanism which
would complicate it. Space is not an unreasonable character in a mount
option...

Bye	Pavel