Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sun, 12 Dec 1999 01:09:01 +0900
From:      "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>
To:        Martin Hinner <mhi@linux.gyarab.cz>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Contribution
Message-ID:  <3852771D.8C8BFA3C@newsguy.com>
References:  <Pine.LNX.3.96.991210191842.4105A-100000@gyarab>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Martin Hinner wrote:
> 
> I originally posted this message to -questions mailing list, but it wasn't
> probably the right place :-( So, if you read it few days ago, please silently
> ignore ;-)

Perhaps -fs mailing list would be a more adequate choice?

> a) I am maintainer/author of Filesystems-HOWTO. It's a document describing
> dozens of filesystems and accessing them from various OSes. I think it would
> be very useful to have this HOWTO in FreeBSD. What do you think? For more
> information see http://www.penguin.cz/~mhi/fs/. Should I make a port for you?

I notice you give the impression that a log filesystem is the same
as a journalling filesystem, which is not the case. BTW, you could
give NetBSD's LFS as an example of Log Filesystems. FreeBSD killed
LFS because it broken long time ago, nobody ever fixed it, and it
was made largely obsolete by softupdates. And, anyway, better work
on a journalled filesystem than try to fix a log one.

Also, I'd suggest removing "MD" as header for one section, since it
only has meaning in Linux. Perhaps you could call it RAID
filesystems, and have subsections of Linux, etc? FreeBSD has two. An
old one, called ccd, which just concatenates devices, and a new one,
called vinum, which does the whole RAID she-bang.

Other feedback... :-) A Unix disklabel is like a DOS partition
table. If you are referring to the actual partitions, they are
called, in Unix, "partitions". And have been called that long before
DOS came along.

Information on AIX logical volume manager would be interesting too,
given the scope of the document.

Next... why don't you make mention of filesystems such as union fs
or umap fs?

Mmmm... no mention of Joliet access with FreeBSD. Gives the
impression FreeBSD doesn't support it. Well, same can be said of
FreeBSD and FAT-32/Ext2FS, actually. :-)

Let's see... Ah, Sun Solaris is BSD based only up to SunOS 4.x
(Solaris 1.x). From SunOS 5.x (Solaris 2.x) on, it's SysV.

No mention of any stuff by Erez Zadok
(http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~ezk/research/software/). Or the page
itself. :-)

Well, that's all I saw off-hand.

Anyway, frankly, I don't think this document would be relevant to
FreeBSD. Perhaps I'm missing something... what would be the purpose
of having it?

> b) I'd like to write in my HOWTO also about filesystems in FreeBSD. Can you
> help me? Any documents, links and other information are *very* welcome. I'd
> like to ask also BSD FFS developers.

Look in /usr/share/doc/papers/, I think there is a document on ffs
there. A reading of Kirk's paper on softupdates would also be
interesting, but I don't have the url. Finally, it would be
interesting to have a section of stacked filesystems (sorry if
already there is one, I'm just scanning the document). I don't have
the url to those papers (John Heidemann's) either. I'm sure you can
get both urls if you ask at -fs.

> c) Few months ago I wrote BFS (UnixWare boot filesystem) Linux kernel
> implementation. Because <tigran@sco.com> implemented better (read-write)
> version of it, my version is obsolete. If you want to port this code to
> FreeBSD, I can re-release it under BSD license. There is small problem - I've
> never developed anything to FreeBSD kernel. But I have kernel-level
> development experience.

Not much use unless supported by boot[12] and loader.

> d) I installed FreeBSD on extended partition using GRUB bootmanager (see GNU
> homepage). Are you interested? [Some people asked me to write step-by-step
> howto. But it is not easy, so I'd like to make small changes to sysinstall to
> accept also extended FreeBSD partitions].

If we supported it, people would foolishly install on them and then
not be able to use them. Unless boot[12]/loader support it, I don't
think it's a good idea. Requiring extra software that does not come
with the system is a bad idea.

--
Daniel C. Sobral			(8-DCS)
who is as social as a wampas

dcs@newsguy.com
dcs@freebsd.org


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3852771D.8C8BFA3C>