Possibilities for ext2fs
Chris Telting
telting@sprynet.com
Mon Aug 23 09:56:00 GMT 1999
> I'm not sure how either politics or design enters into this.
Design because it might involve rewriting all cygwin file
and mount code and creating a subsystem. Politics
because I can virtually gaurantee that most people wouldn't
like my implementation probably and if it won't be used
why do it?
> If you can create a filesystem driver for NT then you don't have to make
> any modifications to cygwin. The mount/path code in cygwin is not
> *that* complicated. It's orders of magnitude less complicated than
> linux ext2 code.
I'm not going to pay a grand for the ms ifs kit or any other ifs kit
just to do something I would give away. Kernel code for nt is
highly volitile and quite difficult to debug. That would be too
much of an effort.
A user level subsystem is better for initial development even if
it might be slow. Then evolve it by moving it to a kernel driver
than an ifs driver with extenstions for cygwin.
> If you're talking about writing a user-level addition to cygwin which
> just "knows" how to access an ext2 file system then I think you're
> widely underestimating the amount of time required for a port.
The linux filesystem code itself I am quite fimilular with. Porting
that code to a user mode nt dll would relatively be trivial. Integrating
it into cygwin is the hard part as it might require giving cigwin a
root cancal. The homework is in understanding cygwin as I havn't
gotten to playing with that code yet.
> I certainly would be interested in seeing this for Cygwin but it seems
> like you have massive amounts of homework ahead of you if you are
> serious about this project.
The homework is in reading a signifigant ammount of the cygwin
source code to figure out how files and everything work and then
rewritting a coherent subsystem which is the only difficult part I
would see in it.
> I'm willing to assist by setting up a cygwin-ext2 mailing list and ftp
> repository, if that helps.
You must work at cygnus.
I never decided to do it. It can be done in two to three weeks but
is it worth it? A user mode driver would be slow. And it would only
work on nt(though something similar might be possible for win9x is
it worth it?). A kernel driver would be 6 months since it would require
figuring out how to write kernel drivers and filesystem mini-drivers in
cygwin.
In my origional post I was mostly asking if anyone had thought
about such a possability, i.e. if anyone had thought about it
or if development might have been going in a different direction
such as implementing a database to virtualize a unix filesytem
ontop of the current filesystems or implementing stuff using the
ntfs extended attributes, etc...
BlueCoder
bluecoder@rocketmail.com
May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.
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