FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: About filesystems

["Marcus Petersson" <mp_1@xxxxxxx>]

"Bruno G. Albuquerque" <bga@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> All filesystems implement a specific API that is required by the BeOS VFS
> (Virtual File System) layer. Of course the internal implementation varies
> from FS to FS as they do thigs differently.

Yes, but obviously they don't share any implementation source.

> > It would be good to have some documentation about the dos filesystem.
> Well, the source is avaiable. :) 

Indeed. Seems attr.c and file.c contains every function of interest.

> Also, Dominic's "Practical File System
> Design With The Be File System" is available for download and is the bes
> reference there is for writting a filesystem for BeOS.

I guess it will keep me busy for a while. ;-)

> A cool thing to do would be something like what the SkyOS guys are doing.
> Basically that is an extra layer that allows attributes to be read and
> written from a specific location (a file, for instance) and that would
> allow adding attribute support to filesystems that do not nativelly
> support it. It is moe or less what HPFS does with FAT partitions in OS/2.

You mean on the same device? I thought about that idea for a while as well,
but decided it was much easier to start with mirror files on the boot disk.
 
> I guess a cool approach would be to create a link that would be linked to
> the FS add-on and would provide all the abstraction for this so the code
> required in the FS itself for this to work would be minimal.

Typo? "to create a library that would be linked..."? Yes, this is just about
what I have in mind. Just not sure at which level to implement it. Using the
C api (fs_attr.h) might be a better idea eventually, rather than relying on
StorageKit. Doesn't matter much for quick hack though.

Marcus