From owner-freebsd-fs Thu Aug 28 18:53:15 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id SAA04280 for fs-outgoing; Thu, 28 Aug 1997 18:53:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from eac.iafrica.com (196-31-98-51.iafrica.com [196.31.98.51]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id SAA04271 for ; Thu, 28 Aug 1997 18:53:02 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from rnordier@localhost) by eac.iafrica.com (8.8.5/8.6.12) id DAA09891; Fri, 29 Aug 1997 03:44:58 +0200 (SAT) From: Robert Nordier Message-Id: <199708290144.DAA09891@eac.iafrica.com> Subject: Re: MS-DOS file system issues In-Reply-To: <199708282349.QAA04510@k2.cup.hp.com> from Jim Mattson at "Aug 28, 97 04:49:01 pm" To: jmattson@wco.com Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 03:44:57 +0200 (SAT) Cc: freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL31 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Jim Mattson wrote: > I see that fixing the MS-DOS file system is a high priority task, but > just exactly how broken is it? I mount most of my logical DOS drives > ro out of paranoia, but I've got one small throw-away partition > mounted rw for pushing things over to the Win95 world. I keep waiting > for it to eat my data, and it hasn't happened yet. > > I would like to see Win95 long filename support, and I'd be willing > to work on that, but are there more fundamental flaws that I'm > missing? As of the 2.x releases, mounting MS-DOS partitions should not cause wholescale corruption, and the present msdosfs works reasonably well for simple operations. It is fairly old and generally buggy, though. I have a new DOS filesystem, with Win95 support, running here, though some of the code is still alpha-quality, and I have literally not looked at it for several months, due to pressure of work. Once I can find a week or two, I want to look at cleaning this up for release. However (that said) I think it would be a good thing if anyone keen on working on adding Win95 to the msdosfs went ahead. The new DOS FS has been a very long time coming, and I'm sure many peope would appreciate the LFN support. -- Robert Nordier