Hi Steve & Mercury, >> While I agree that further information would be welcome, >> I am generally optimistic about possibilities for exFAT. > > ...prolly best still to leave it to the network redirector, and keep it > out of the kernel proper, just in case. > > But perhaps it could be provided as a TSR; and a card reader, or such, > treated as a floppy drive. Fixed letter, but when there's no card in the > slot, Not ready reading drive X: Abort, Retry, Fail?
Of course - that is exactly what I suggested exactly 24 hours ago. Actually normal FAT (12, 16, "32") is the only system which is simplistic enough for the kernel while all others are better in separately loaded drivers... :-) To answer Mercuries mail as well: > I hope "remain compatible with DOS" does not equal "remain compatible > with FAT 12/16/32" since the implementation I was envisioning would not > offer any backward compatibility. Drives formatted in this FAT version > would not be able to be read by any other DOS version without a software > module to do so. That sucks for compatibility zealots but, as is said, > sometimes to go forwards you must first go backwards. Well you can try to go forwards, but what use is a cool gadget when nobody can use it? You would have to offer at least some rock-stable, easily loadable drivers for DOS, Linux (including Android), Windows (all currently popular variants of it) and Mac OS (including iOS) to be available on all places where now exFAT is already working and pre-installed. Next, you would be in the position of having to convince people who bought a pre- formatted exFAT e.g. SD card that they should RE-format that. Which would require them to install your driver on every item where they want to actually use the SD card. Which means that you would have to get smartphone, camera, ... vendors on board. If you try to make the plan less bold, you have the option to provide only drivers for DOS and, say, Linux and Windows 7+XP. Linux because it might be easier and pave the way for Android. If, on the other hand, you ONLY provide DOS drivers, even all people who dual-boot anything else with DOS would have to boot DOS to access files on your new filesystem and be limited to DOS writeable partitions when making copies of their files to access them from the Linux, Windows or other on their same PC. Which means that, because DOS sucks at accessing NTFS or ext2 drives, they would have to copy their files between your new filesystem and a FAT32 partition, creating a bottleneck where anything which makes your filesystem better than FAT32 would never get visible from other operating systems. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
