OSDev.org

I was trying to figure out how to make multiple filesystems fold into one as I'm now making the generic register-filesystem logic (and register-device logic). I got to wondering, how do you figure out what goes where...

Windows puts every partition into its own drive letter and does not have anything more complicated than that (* other than winNT which has mount points, that nobody knows about).

Linux and related systems have a root FS and mount stuff into it according to some file on the root filesystem.

I don't like either. Windows is very arbitrary and unintuitive - is F: my cdrom drive, my network drive, a USB stick or half of an SD card? Linux on the other hand is unfriendly to auto-mounting which is one of my design desires, where most distros automount things into /media or /mnt. I don't know of any other designs right now, but can't think of many other logical ones.

What does your VFS look like? Why do you think that's a good design, and what things do you want in a VFS?

What makes *nix filesystems unfriendly to automount? /media makes perfect sense to me.

I have seen systems that refer to drives like Windows but with more intuitive names (that end up being unintuitive when the OS's view and the user's view of something don't match up) like "cdrom0:" and "floppy0:" and "ide0:".

You can set any Linux system to automount file systems wherever you choose. I think it's a brilliant design.

Actually, I don't like my filesystems to automount anyway. But the *NIX concept is really good, because one can split subdirectories across multiple partitions like I did on my one computer and link directories across different filesystems with symbolic links like I did on my other computer that has two Linux installations in separate partitions but they both automount each other's root filesystems and then there's a link pointing to a certain subdirectory of the other system's home folder in the current system's home folder (it's a long story as to why I haven't linked the entire home directories or put the home directories on a separate partition).