Re: [MiNT] How to unmount a partition?

[Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

Hi Remi,

On Wed, Mar 26, 2036 at 10:50:22AM +0000, Remi Villatel wrote:
> I'd prefer there was a real 'umount'; everything would be easier and clearer. 
> The useless 'sync' isn't enough. That's something our MiNT gurus should think 
> about, IMHO.

Before you can unmount you would have to mount and that has several
disadvantages, ask Frank about it.  Besides, there are few machines (no
Ataris) where you can prevent the user from simply pressing the eject
button of the floppy.  If the floppy disk isn't synched you are likely to
lose data. That is no MiNT problem but a general one.

I am not sure if the Atari offers any possibility to "catch" the user
ejecting other removable media.  If there is no such chance, then the MiNT
gurus can't do anything about it, no matter if we have a mount command or
not.  The problem is that you always have to find a way to flush the
buffers before the media get removed.

But Frank really knows much more about all this.

The reason I answer you: I basically agree with you, I would really prefer
to have a real mount command for MiNT.  That "media change detected" stuff
is still quite suspect to me. But: Take an average Unix system (say Linux
for convenience) and their CD handling. The clean way to handle a CD is to
mount the device and tell the kernel about the type of driver to use.  To
make this more comfortable you can omit the information about the fs type
(driver) by fixing it in /etc/fstab.  Next step, Linux allows you to
autodetect the fs type of the CD and automatically load the correct kernel
module (fs driver) for the type of CD it finds (uhm, does it? I think so
...). And next step is that Linux automatically mounts and unmounts the CD
when the media get inserted or removed.  Ooops, that's actually exactly
what MiNT offers for years.

In other words: mount/umount is not the problem.  It is just a different
concept of filesystem integration.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
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mailto:guido@freemint.de