submount?

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 09:23, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 08:56:38AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > The problem it tries to solve is hard. It will require fundamental
> > kernel changes to get right I fear, and just trying to paper over the
> > underlying kernel with a small module ain't gonna fix it, it will remain
> > just papering over ;(
> 
> Or user space 8). volumagic proves you can do it that way for only a small
> hit
> 

I've just put some code in HAL to detect whether the eject button is
pressed (using MMC-2) so ideally HAL would relay this to gnome-vfs which
would emit a PreUnmount signal such that apps closes their files and
then it can do the unmount(1), eject(1) dance. Thing is, I don't know
how many drives correctly implement this MMC-2 bit, any insight?

Maybe it would be smarter to get HAL to use some of the volumagic code
[1], since I guess a similar technique can be used for partitions on a
USB drive to give safe removal when the drive is not in use. Would this
be a good idea? Or are there kernel changes on the horizon to solve all
of these problems?

Thanks,
David

[1] : I think it can be done without changing the HAL API, which means
vendors can ship HAL with or without volumagic stuff, here's the thread

http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/hal/2004-May/000244.html