Re: [CFT][PATCH] large /proc/mounts and friends

[Alexander Viro]

On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> So you'd have the start be something like
> 
> 	p = m->op->start(m);
> 	if (m->did_lseek) {
> 		m->did_lseek = 0;
> 		p = m->op->seek(m, pos);
> 	}
> 	p = m->op->next(m, p);
> 
> instead of that for-loop..

Umm... That assumes that we actually can keep state.  Neither /proc/mounts
nor /proc/ksyms can do that (well, /proc/mounts can - at the price of really
dirty trick; we can insert a dummy element into vfsmntlist and use it as a
cursor, but I'd rather Not Go There(tm)).

However, having ->seek() (with default being a loop) makes sense.  I'll
play with that area and try to get a decent API - I understand what you
want, but there are several other issues I'd like to deal with.  I suspect
that ->start() semantics needs to be changed a bit...