From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Feb 5 04:57:55 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id EAA25037 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 5 Feb 1996 04:57:55 -0800 (PST) Received: from eac.iafrica.com (slipper101153.iafrica.com [196.7.101.153]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id EAA25030 for ; Mon, 5 Feb 1996 04:57:50 -0800 (PST) Received: (from rnordier@localhost) by eac.iafrica.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) id OAA00269; Mon, 5 Feb 1996 14:54:26 +0200 From: Robert Nordier Message-Id: <199602051254.OAA00269@eac.iafrica.com> Subject: Re: Some thoughts on FAT filesystems To: luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it (Luigi Rizzo) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 14:54:24 +0200 (SAT) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199602050824.JAA20270@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> from "Luigi Rizzo" at Feb 5, 96 09:24:40 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8a] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk On Mon, 5 Feb 1996, Luigi Rizzo wrote: > Since some people is now looking at the msdosfs, it is nice that > the discussion on FAT has progressed a little bit. > > I'd like to contribute some more thoughts. In the following I assume > that there are no concurrent accesses to the FAT partition. New ideas, or combinations of ideas, are always interesting. :-) As the new kid on the block, I think the filesystem you describe would have to show how it is superior to two existing, FAT-incompatible contenders for the title of Improved FAT FS: the HPFS (OS/2) and NTFS (Windows NT). The HPFS makes use of a banding system similar to the one you describe. Both HPFS and NTFS also make use B-Trees in place of unsorted directories. NTFS features transaction logging to support better filesystem recovery, and both support hot-fixing (transparent recovery from media errors). Etc.... Of course, what we really need is a vastly improved FAT filesystem that makes use of FAT-identical data structures, and also is algorithmically similar to all MS-DOS versions in every respect. :-) -- Robert Nordier