improved fs_rom

[Norman Feske]

Hi Ben,

On 27.12.2017 05:26, Nobody III wrote:
> While working on my own "Sculpt" scenario, I saw that the fs_rom server
> still doesn't allow using multiple directories as sources. Being able to
> separate the executables, libraries, and config files would be very
> helpful for organizing the filesystem and providing shared libraries to
> programs without exposing the configuration files as well. Is there a
> way to do this with the components currently available, or should fs_rom
> (or some other component) be modified to enable ROM file separation?

fs_rom can deal with subdirectories. It just takes the last part of the
label as path, which may contain "/" characters. So if your file system
has subdirectories like '/rom' and '/config', you may request the ROM
module 'pdfview' from the '/rom' directory by opening a ROM session with
the label "/rom/pdfview". The second piece of the puzzle is the use of
init's label rewriting mechanism in routing rules. Let's say we have a
subsystem 'PDF-viewer', which is an init instance that hosts one
'pdfview' among other components as child components. The start node of
such a subsystem may look like this:

  <start name="PDF-viewer">
    <binary name="init"/>
    <resource .../>
    <route>
      <service name="ROM" label="config>
        <child name="fs_rom" label="config/pdf_viewer.config"/>
      </service>
      <service name="ROM" label="pdfview">
        <child name="fs_rom" label="rom/pdfview"/>
      </service>
      ...
    </route>
  </start>

The imporant part of the example above are the 'label' attributes in the
routing-target nodes. When specified, init replaces the child-provided
label by the one specified as attribute value.

As another possible alternative, you may connect the 'fs_rom' not
directly to you file-system server but put a VFS server in between. In
the <vfs> of this VFS server, you can mount several other <fs> nodes at
the root of the <vfs> with each <fs> pointing to the real file system
but with a different 'root' attributes. This way, the VFS server will
present a "union mount" of the corresponding directories.

Does one of the two options sounds viable for you?

Cheers
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

https://www.genode-labs.com · https://genode.org

Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth