From: eric@tantalus.dell.com (Eric Youngdale) Subject: Re: linux on CDROM. Date: 16 Jul 1992 14:15:33 GMT
>In article <1992Jul8.170525.8293@morrow.stanford.edu> bir7@leland.Stanford.EDU (Ross Biro) writes:
> With the ability to mount a regular file as a file system, wouldn't
>it be possible to use a ISO9660 file system, with a file on it that faked
>a real filesystem. I.E. in the root directory of the cd-rom have a file
>called Mountme. When you mount it you get the exact same files as on
>the cdrom, but with there full names and a reasonable directory layout.
>It would require putting all the inodes and directories in one file, and
>perhaps faking out some of the file system code, but I don't think it
>would be that big of a problem. It would really give Linux the best
>of both worlds.
I have been working on a ISO9660 filesystem, and it is getting close to
being ready for beta-testing (read-only devices are *much* easier than
read-write devices :-)). I can mount the disk and see all of the files, and
there are just some minor details that need to be ironed out.
I do not know what you mean by a "reasonable" directory layout.
The directory structure under ISO9660 is already tree structured, and
with my filesystem you cannot tell that it is different except that the
filenames names are a little funny and the inode numbers are huge.
Full names is another matter. As it is, the filenames on the disk are
all upper-case, but the filesystem maps them to lower case. I will also add a
mapping for the ';' -> '.' (one of the details). It would not be hard to have
a mapping, but it would be hard to test until someone actually mastered a disk
which had something like this. I wonder if it would be easier to use symbolic
links from a regular disk to point to the files on the cdrom.