*BSD News Article 7351


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From: richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: 386BSD -- What happened to my loadfd command?
Message-ID: <7837@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 3 Nov 92 14:22:26 GMT
References: <Oct.29.18.06.59.1992.22100@ocean.rutgers.edu> <1992Oct30.091651.10922@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg>
Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk
Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh
Lines: 23

In article <1992Oct30.091651.10922@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg (Othman Ahmad) writes:

>: 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 doesn't have to be done in the kernel.  It would be possible to
write an NFS server that provided access to an MSDOS disk as a
filesystem.  I did this for minix floppies on a Sun.  It would be
somewhat harder for MSDOS floppies since I don't think MSDOS has
anything like inode numbers, so you'd have to do the file handles some
other way.

Even if it's in the kernel, it should just be another VFS filesystem
type, so I don't see why it makes anything harder to understand.

-- Richard

-- 
Richard Tobin,
Human Communication Research Centre,                       R.Tobin@ed.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.