> > Note that the FAT filesystem (like so many other filesystems) is not > intended for simultaneous use by multiple clients; that would be like > having a hard drive physically attached to multiple computers with a > spider-web of IDE ribbons spliced together and expecting the OS running > on each computer to magically co-operate when writing to the filesystem > without any awareness of the other OSs. I'm not suggesting that you're > doing this.
Just as a point of interest I did once do *almost* this. I was the proud owner of an ISA MFM drive multiplex card that would split one drive between two ISA hosts. It did sort of work, mostly because early DOS does not buffer the directory entries, each access was in effect a serial read before write, so two hosts creating a file on FAT filesystem works, each one gets the next free cluster, as read is blocking and syncro this mostly works. What does not work is writing random blocks without locking from two hosts within the same file - so any database type application would tend to corrupt the disk... as did parallel renames etc. The device was intended for a small "common" read only fat partition and one active partition per host. The product died when drive prices dropped, remember at the same point in the timeline an ISA Ethernet card was $800 and Novell was the only game around. Cheers, Jon _______________________________________________ gPXE mailing list [email protected] http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe
