<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/2/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">David Nicol</b> <<a href="mailto:davidnicol@gmail.com">davidnicol@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
My naive and ignorant presumption is that initfs sets up the file<br>system structure at a higher level -- perhaps the virtual file system that<br>linux uses to make all the file systems behave the same -- rather than<br>
going through the whole dance of pretending that the data in question is<br>really on some kind of external media that has to be mounted and so on.<br>Not alert enough at this point to construct a nice metaphor.<br></blockquote>
</div><br>VFS doesn't take away the lower level of mounting a file system, it's a layer of abstraction that hides the details of the process. (This is a Very Good Thing, because it allows the code for managing files, directories, pipes, etc. to be written once at the top layer, a second layer to handle logical representation schemes, and a lower layer to work with the physical hardware.) There's still got to be a device, a driver, and the low-level code that knows about the actual representation of the filesystems on whatever media they occupy.
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