From: tthorn@daimi.aau.dk (Tommy Thorn) Subject: Re: BSD filesystems? Xenix FS? X11 on hercules screen? Date: 20 Nov 1992 14:29:28 GMT
eric@tantalus.nrl.navy.mil (Eric Youngdale) writes:
> BSD: no. Xenix: yes, there is a filesystem. I have toyed with the
>idea of writing a filesystem for linux that would understand a BSD ufs
>filesystem but the differences are so great between the bsd VFS layer and the
>linux VFS layer that it would be easier to hack the minix filesystem to
>understand ufs than to try and port the ufs filesystem. I have not decided if
>I want to do this or not.
I too was toying with the idea of a better filesystem. I've looked
into FFS (from BSD) and LFS (from Sprite). While it's correct,
that it might be easier to clone the Minix filesystem to use UFS
structures, I fear some of the points of UFS would be lost and
performens wouldn't be as expected.
If someone was going into LFS, they would also need special
support from the buffer cache (such as being able to change
the disk address of demand loaded pages). LFS is the way to
go *if* you have enough memory (IMHO ~ 16Mb). As this might
not be the case for the casual Linux user, I would concentrate
on FFS. Also, it would be nice to be able to share filesystem
between Linux and 386BSD.
As we finally got decent SCSI drivers (Thank you, Erik), the Minix
filesystem, and the extended one even more so, has become the
blocking factor. We need a better filesystem.
>-Eric
>--
>Eric Youngdale
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