Borrowing NTVFS layer from Samba4 for Wine?

[Mike McCormack]

Dan Kegel wrote:

>> I see it this way - wine will need a full NTFS redirector at some point,
>> to correctly handle remote fileystems.  Why is the local disk any
>> different from a remote redirected filesystem?  Samba could be hooked in
>> at this point (and my even assist in providing access to those remote
>> files).

The local disk is not different from a remote redirected filesystem - 
they are both accessed through the kernel.  ie. there is no remote 
filesystem support in Wine, only in the Linux Kernel.

> I suppose one could do it that way, but I was thinking
> of turning Samba4's NTVFS layer into an ELF shared library
> that could be used either by Samba or by Wine
> (or both).  That way it'd be easier to simulate local
> Windows disks accurately; doing it via Samba would make
> them seem like network disks, which sometimes wouldn't be
> good enough, I bet.
> - Dan

Without having a process wide lock of some kind, the only way to use a 
shared library for the VFS would be in the Wine server.  Implementing 
reading and writing via wineserver has pretty bad performance penalties.

IMO, the best way is to add what we need to the Linux kernel.

If we were to extend smbfs or cifs to allow access to the NTFS data that 
the unix VFS doesn't allow, that would provide us with fast and atomic 
access to remove NTFS filesystems.

----

Just got another mail from Dan while writing:

> On second thought, NTVFS ought to move into the Linux kernel.
> Then both Samba and Wine would use native NTFS Win32 API calls
> implemented by Linux directly.

Yeah, I think that is the best way forward.

Mike