From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Aug 21 16:25:59 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id QAA18210 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 21 Aug 1995 16:25:59 -0700 Received: from genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au [129.127.96.120]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id QAA18204 for ; Mon, 21 Aug 1995 16:25:56 -0700 Received: from msmith@localhost by genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (8.6.9/8.6.9) id JAA25059; Tue, 22 Aug 1995 09:31:22 +0930 From: Michael Smith Message-Id: <199508220001.JAA25059@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: Install issues (was: State of the union speech To: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 1995 09:31:21 +0930 (CST) Cc: roberto@keltia.frmug.fr.net, terry@cs.weber.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <199508211747.DAA03262@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Aug 22, 95 03:47:25 am Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1510 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Bruce Evans stands accused of saying: > > >I'm sure you're aware Linux has this scheme for at least a year, called > >UMSDOS, made by a French guy... > > UMSDOS is apparently a mixed blessing. It is much slower than ext2fs, and > people tend to keep using it and wonder why Linux is so slow. > > We could do demos using a big file mapped by the vn driver to a virtual > disk containing slices and partitions, but the file systems would be > very slow (even if the DOS file is contiguous, msdosfs doesn't support > clustering so it would do i/o's in too-small sizes). Oddly, I haven't had any bites on my last post about this, so I'll ask again : I have code that creates a large contiguous slab of sectors in an MSDOS filesystem, and hides them under a file. I've explored what I can of the diskslice code and the like, but I'm at a loss as to how to redirect a slice to point at this slab, short of rewriting the partition table (which would be Bad) or writing a variant on the vnode driver (which would defeat the whole purpose). This is basically a ready-to-go partition, it just needs water, so to speak. > Bruce -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] My car has "demand start" -Terry Lambert UNIX: live FreeBSD or die! [[