boot sequence discussion

[Monty J. Harder]

On 9/2/07, David Nicol <davidnicol at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My naive and ignorant presumption is that initfs sets up the file
> system structure at a higher level -- perhaps the virtual file system that
> linux uses to make all the file systems behave the same -- rather than
> going through the whole dance of pretending that the data in question is
> really on some kind of external media that has to be mounted and so on.
> Not alert enough at this point to construct a nice metaphor.
>

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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