Hi Mercury, so you want to run a NAS or home automation on DOS?
For NAS, you need a multitasking OS, not DOS. For home automation, which limitation of FAT would be a problem? Same for other light embedded devices. Flash does not give good performance for FAT, but embedded devices would have been free to use one of many available Linux filesystems. But did not. Of course the question can be extended: What if an existing nicer-than-FAT filesystem is used more in DOS? Have a look at what already EXISTS for Linux, then have a look at the source code to check which filesystems are 1. simple enough to make a "light" DOS driver possible (some might even be so simple that booting DOS from them is feasible, but only a really popular filesystem may get kernel drivers), 2. better than FAT in some way (e.g. more speed on flash storage, better space allocation or LFN in a less insane way than VFAT) but 3. not putting lots of code into features which mean nothing for DOS, such as ACL based file permissions or extreme file or disk size support beyond existing FAT32 API or "network redirector" API expressible number range. Looking forward to your review of existing FS-es! Of course with an outlook towards which properties a not-yet-existing FS could have to be even nicer for use within a DOS based storage "ecosystem". Cheers, Eric PS: By "light", I mean a driver which is not 100s of kilobytes in size and which can be fast with a bit of DOS RAM and XMS instead of needing 500 MB of DPMI RAM and protected mode implementation :-) > NAS devices, home automation computers and other similar devices are > becoming increasingly common, and offering a filesystem finally capable > of handling the sizes of modern hard drives could be a welcome > improvement for them, and just may help get FreeDOS used in a wider market. > > How do we know this isn't a chicken-and-egg problem? Maybe all the > devices only use the proprietary exFAT because there was no open > alternative. Maybe, had there been one available, we would all... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
