dg > UMSDOS is h u g e. While it *would* make ELKS easier to use, it
dg > would most likely use so much space you couldn't use it for
dg > everything. Remember you need the UMSDOS, MSDOS and FAT modules to
dg > make it work. If you *can* fit it in, it'd be wonderful; but I'd be
dg > surprised.
ror4 > That's true -- but FAT is a very simple filesystem, so we may not
ror4 > actually need that much code. Perhaps it'll be better to rewrite
ror4 > all the filesystem code from scratch rather than lift it up from
ror4 > Linux-386. But before I do that I must find out more about the
ror4 > UMSDOS data structures as well as the workings of the kernel wrt
ror4 > filesystems...
I have another idea, I am not at all sure if it would work (I know next
to nothing about programming)
Would it be possible to have a large file present in the root directory of
a FAT partition which was in fact an image of a Minix Filesystem. That
way, people could have ELKS co-existing with MS-DOS (or another DOS) on
the same hard drive. The part of the code that read the Minix image would
surely need to know virtually nothing about FAT and so the code size could
be kept to a minimum (perhaps the user could even tell it where the image
file lives on the FAT partition to further reduce necessary code)
I know that what I am talking about will sound to many like the loop device
driver in Linux, and that that is too large to implement here, but is
there not a far simpler way to implement it if you only want to deal with
a single type of filesystem image stored on a single type of partition.
Just an idea
David C.S. Prior
