Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!wupost!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!agate!agate.berkeley.edu!cgd From: cgd@eden.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Chris G. Demetriou) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: 386BSD -- What happened to my loadfd command? Date: 31 Oct 92 16:49:20 Organization: Kernel Hackers 'r' Us Lines: 39 Message-ID: <CGD.92Oct31164920@eden.CS.Berkeley.EDU> References: <Oct.29.18.06.59.1992.22100@ocean.rutgers.edu> <1992Oct30.091651.10922@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> <1992Oct31.164546.13101@cs.wisc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: eden.cs.berkeley.edu In-reply-to: jcargill@oka.cs.wisc.edu's message of Sat, 31 Oct 1992 16:45:46 GMT In article <1992Oct31.164546.13101@cs.wisc.edu> jcargill@oka.cs.wisc.edu (Jon Cargille) writes: In article <1992Oct30.091651.10922@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg (Othman Ahmad) writes: >andy Rowan (rowan@ocean.rutgers.edu) wrote: >: >: Or, another solution, is there any way to mount a dos-formatted >: floppy as a filesystem (a la 'mount /pcfs' in SunOS)??? >: >I do not like it. It makes OS more complex to understand. >It is already being done for CDROM, but it is meant for SCSI driver only >. If only we have mtools style for CDROM. It will be easier for me to >understand and modify. > I think your reason for not liking it is pretty weak. Sure, virtual memory, the FFS, and a host of other useful things make the OS more complex, too. Actually, i think it's arguable that adding a new filesystem adds *NO* complexity to the system; all you *should* have to do is add a few table entries. That's why the vnode abstraction was introduced; code for a filesystem shouldn't be tangled w/code for another filesystem. Unfortunately, they didn't get the vnode interface quite right in net/2: the inode routines aren't done thru a switch. (while i'm sure that's great for performance, it makes it damned hard to write a new filesystem which is more or less like an existing filesystem, w/o copying all of the routines.) Chris -- Chris G. Demetriou cgd@cs.berkeley.edu "Sometimes it is better to have twenty million instructions by Friday than twenty million instructions per second." -- Wes Clark