> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Alexander R. > Pruss > Sent: Sunday, September 18, 2005 10:02 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Plucker and FAT32 > > On Sun, 18 Sep 2005, Dennis McCunney wrote: > > On the Palm Lifedrive, Palm implemented FAT32 file system support > > to handle the 4GB internal hard drive the Lifedrive uses. A > > programmer figured out how to patch the FAT32.PRC driver to get it > > to run on other devices, and instruction were available on another > > board for getting it installed on the Zodiac in place of the built-in > > FATFS driver. Among other incentives, the FAT32 driver has better > > performance reading FAT16 cards. > > I think someone should write a VFS caching hack.
Seconded! Though actually, the folks at Brayder Technologies (Jack Flash and Jack Sprat) went one better and implemented a virtual memory solution for Palm devices. You can have virtual memory up to 256MB -- it keeps a memory image on the card, and uses RAM as a cache to aid performance. It's still in beta, and reported performance varies depending upon just which device it's installed on, but the fact it's been done at all is fascinating. See http://www.brayder.com/memoryjack/ for details. > > I installed it, and verified the performance gains with > > VFSMark. Everything worked fine, *except* Plucker. > > I assume Plucker works fine on a real LifeDrive. As do I. I don't have a real Lifedrive, and can't confirm. > My guess is that there is a volume label problem--what you > said about the drive label changing is relevant (I don't think > VOLUME.NAM is really the volume name--FAT16 at least used to have > a special directory entry for the volume name). No, it is. VOLUME.NAM is a file containing the volume label displayed by applications like FileZ. When I edited that file to change the string to "LEXAR MEDIA", amtching what the card used to be called, that's what showed as the name for the card. > Plucker used to have trouble with devices that had two > volumes with the same label or even one with an empty label. > Maybe some vestige of the problem remains. I thought I had > fixed this issue, but maybe not. For the record, after installing the FAT32 driver, the content of the VOLUME.NAM file contained non-ascii chars. That might also have been a problem. > In any case, I can't really test this myself with the FAT32 driver, > because I don't want to violate Palm's copyright by pirating > their FAT32 driver. Understood. I just couldn't resist the urge to play with it and see what happened. And you would have to patch thier driver to get it to work in any case. > Alex ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ plucker-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
