RFC: Kernel changes that may affect desktops

[Kevin Kofler]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> So, what you'll get is a notification that a block device has requested
> removal along with a notification that a dock device is being undocked.
> What you do with the block device is up to you, but in general you'll
> want to unmount it.

IMHO DeviceKit should just unmount it itself and notify the desktop that it
has unmounted the device so the desktop can report it (or ignore it if it
doesn't know about the event). I don't see why we need to add code to every
desktop to listen for a "please unmount me" event and send an unmount
request back when this could just be handled within DeviceKit. Or even
within the kernel for that matter, do we really need a roundtrip through
userspace for this? When and why would we ever want to do anything *other*
than unmounting the device when this event triggers?

An additional problem is: what if the unmount fails due to open files? Your
suggestion to just kill the applications sounds really broken to me. A
forced unmount at kernel level and failing any attempts to further access
that file just like what happens when an NFS mount goes offline sounds like
a better solution to me.

        Kevin Kofler