Re: Looking for a project...

> FWIW the thing I'd like to see (and if I ever get a spare few hours I'll
> look into doing) would be to write something like the Linux umsdos fs. For
> the non-Linux types on the list, this basically takes a standard dos fs but
> uses a special file (if present) in each subdirectory to manage additional
> attributes such as ownership and to provide additional filename space. The
> beauty of such a system is that it's overlayed on top of the dos fs and
> doesn't stop it from being used normally under dos (it's just some of the
> dos versions of long filenames can look a bit strange).

Maybe it would be better to port CMU's DOS-FS, it's a file system
based on a normal DOS FAT layout but with some enhacements that make
it much faster than BSD's FFS.

When the paper was presented on Winter Usenix '94 the people at CMU
didn't have 4.4 booting in their machines so they didn't know if it
was actually faster than the new 4.4 FFS with the clusering
enhacements.

The paper should be available in mach.cs.cmu.edu.

You can use a DOS-FS fie system as your root partition, just like
umsdos, and you can still use the file system under DOS. The designer
of the DOS-FS, Alessandro Forin is currently working at Microsoft, so
I won't be surprised if the VFAT system of Chicago is actually using
the same tricks for speeding up the fs.

Miguel.
Received on Thu Sep 22 08:57:17 1994