What exactly is supermount, why is it considered 'evil', and was it
disabled for its supposed 'evilness'?
Supermount is one of the methodologies for making removable drives act the way they do under Windows; the media is automatically unmounted when removed (via the button to eject on the drive), and the media automatically remounted and refreshed when inserted (so that the contents of the new media are correctly shown).
I'm not a kernel hacker, but the short version of why it is considered evil is that kernel devs feel that this is a userspace function that should not be managed by the kernel (and additionally that the hacks required to make the kernel manage this functionality are ... evil... in programmer terms).
Yes, the patch that enables supermount (supermount is not a native kernel function) was removed from at least the gentoo-dev-sources because it was obsoleted (which the kernel devs had presumably been trying to accomplish for some time). From the Changelog for gentoo-dev-sources:
- Removed supermount patch, am told that udev makes this obsolete now. Also, it didn't apply to 2.6.8 anymore, so that made for a good reason to drop it :).
The idea was (I guess) that userspace functions like dbus/hal/ivman or even the (presumably less evil) kernelspace subfs were mature enough to replace supermount (for those that want this functionality; everybody doesn't) in combination with udev, but in my experience, this is not the case.
Holly
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