Filesystem mounts in user namespaces

Posted Aug 7, 2015 2:01 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
In reply to: Filesystem mounts in user namespaces by raven667
Parent article: Filesystem mounts in user namespaces

> How about a small system which handles the USB and filesystem that passes just the file data over an internal network to the main system...

You mean like a microkernel? Kidding aside, this wouldn't be too hard to do with User-Mode Linux and FUSE. I think there is already a project to allow FUSE mounts of any supported filesystem with UML; it just needs support for disk images backed by libusb.

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Filesystem mounts in user namespaces

Posted Aug 7, 2015 2:58 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> You mean like a microkernel?

Haha, we are already well into microkernel territory when we talk about VMs or containers. The whole idea of microkernels is to use the hardware memory protection to enforce separation between services, which is what VMs and containers do, rather than any specific implementation. You could break the system into sections for hardware interaction, sections for user interaction and backend data storage with VMs to enforce the separation.

Filesystem mounts in user namespaces

Posted Aug 7, 2015 15:56 UTC (Fri) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link]

>You mean like a microkernel?

If you're building a real kiosk it could even be hardware. Taking a photo printing kiosk for example, the USB/SD card readers could be connected to a simple device (even down to the level of an Arduino-esque microcontroller) that then transfers files over a limited interface to the real system that prints things, drives touchscreens, and takes credit card payments.