Writing a new filing system...

I'm at the first stages of thinking about writing a new filing system
server, mainly so I learn how it's done. I've decided to pick on the
Minix fs, mainly because I have good documentation in Tanenbaum's Minix
book, and another reasonable implementation in Linux's version.

Anyhow, not knowing much about filing systems, I'm looking for a bit of
advice on where to start. I'd expect that copying one of the existing
servers would get the basics up pretty quickly, but which one would be
best to start with? I'm not planning a particularly high-performance
implementation, just something that will let me read and write to existing
Minix filing systems.

Presuming one of the existing servers is chosen, I'm unsure exactly how
I should handle things like permission/owndership conversion, and also
the multitude of "special" files available under the Minix fs. Presumably
devices should just be ignored, but what about fifos and sockets? Should
I just ignore these as well, or is there some way of passing them off to
the relevant (pipe fs) server(s)? Should I bother?

Obviously, I really have no idea what I'm doing here <grin>, but I'm
doing this mainly as an exercise to find out how it should be done. Any
advice anyone could give me would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

-- 
pat -- empty space is wasted space.