From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 12 18:15:08 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id SAA07834 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 12 Oct 1995 18:15:08 -0700 Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id SAA07828 for ; Thu, 12 Oct 1995 18:15:06 -0700 Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id SAA16381; Thu, 12 Oct 1995 18:11:34 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199510130111.SAA16381@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: can 2.0.1 mount NEXTSTEP disks? To: jason@purcell.jlc.net (Jason T. Nelson) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 18:11:34 -0700 (MST) Cc: questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <9510121853.AA09535@purcell.jlc.net> from "Jason T. Nelson" at Oct 12, 95 02:53:05 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1615 Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > We're in the process of moving our news server from one machine running > NEXTSTEP 3.2 to a second faster machine running FreeBSD 2.0.5. I was > hoping I could mount the NEXTSTEP disk because it's a 4.3 filesystem, but > I've been unsuccessful so far. Can it be done? If not, why not? Probably it is using Motorolla instead of Intel byte order. It may have a different superblock layout. It make handle "immediate files" and "immediate links" differently. You could probably hack a working read-only mount is 12-16 hours if you had NeXT's FS specific header files and were an FS hacker. This might make it a derivative work. It would take longer to reverse engineer. Depending on the way the disk partitioning functions, you may end up needing additional work. In the near future (month or so), logical volume presentation will find itself rather machine independent and totally software driven. At which time hacking that would take about 2-3 hours (assuming you put the disk on a BSD box and had NeXT's header files once again). By default, it won't be mountable without: 1) A BSD device that refers to their idea of where a slice should start on a disk. 2) Probably byte order checking and independence in the FS code you plan to use (for performance reasons, this should be a seperate FS from the FFS/UFS code). 3) Probable superblock differences and other minor layout changes here and there (these should be discernable from their header files). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.