Re: XATTR structure for biosfs entries

[Stephen Usher <Stephen.Usher@earth.ox.ac.uk>]

>Stephen Henson wrote:
>
>> One thing I'd like to see is to have the whole thing rationalised to refer
>> to devices as major/minor device numbers. Then we could do things the Unix
>> way and I could add character/block special files to Minixfs.
>
>Obviously cou can change the XATTR structure to support these, but what's
>the use of that until:
>
>1) the filesystem itself doesn't support block orientated devices
>
>2) the underlying BIOS also supports no unique way of accessing the
>	possible harddrives etc... think about your troubles with AHDI,
>	XHDI & ICD drivers...

See below...

>
>>From what I recall, ls does report some numbers, but these are merely random,
>'cause they're not filled in by the getxattr call but just left as what they
>were before. :-(
>
>You would have to:
>
>1) write a completely new harddisk driver, which is compatible to all old ones

Better still.. emulate the TOS hard disk driver interface layer on top of a
generic, device oriented driver fully integrated into MiNT so as to allow
asynchronous disk transfers etc.. that would speed up MiNT no end!!

It would also allow MiNT processes to forget what the BIOS thinks is out
there on the SCSI/ACSI/IDE busses and be able to do it yourself. Maybe then
we'd be able to have even more esoteric filesystems than the Minix one.

Who's going to write this.... erm.. I dunno! :-)

>or
>
>2) write a meta driver which completely hides the differences between the basic
>ones to the biosfs
>
>Look like you must have done something very close to this to get your minixfs
>work :-) so why not make the final step??? ::--))

Hmm.. I hate kludges to get around bugs in other kludged software.

>
>so long,
>TeSche
>-- 
>PS: If the above written looks weird, than that's because it probably IS.
>WhoDunnIt: Torsten Scherer (Schiller, TeSche...)
>Technical Faculty, University of Bielefeld, Germany (52'5"N 8'35"E)
>EMail: itschere@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de / tesche@dave.hrz.uni-bielefeld.de
>

Steve (living in cloud-cuckoo-land as always :-))

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