Hi Mercury, (note: 2 GB and one core are no problem even for DOS - but for example 8 GB and several cores are supported by almost nothing in DOS, as there are no nice DOS extenders for it)
> I don't see where we need multitasking for NAS use. A program could be > made to both handle incoming requests while serving data and doing other > tasks, eliminating the need for a proper multitasking kernel. Even if You would still have to have several files and networking connections open at the same time and preferably transfer data from several files in parallel. In Linux, you can do that with good performance, but DOS performance is limited because your server must not do concurrent kernel calls. > that was the case, the bloat of the Linux kernel would > make it prohibitive in certain applications. Give an example for that - Linux can even run as embedded operating system on SD cards with built-in Wifi / WLAN :-) I mean on tiny computers of the size of an actual SD card! > I will draw up a spec as I said when I get the time. After that, > implementation is up to the rest of the community. We could just > as easily go with FAT+ or not advance the filesystem at all. As far as I understand, you feel limited by the maximum file size of 2 or maybe 4 GB and maximum disk size of 2 TB? Then you may want to start with adding GPT support to the kernel. Another issue is that FAT32 has bad performance and that the FAT way of doing LFN is rather ugly internally as well. Which other improvements do you have in mind for your new format? And of course: Please really have a look at EXISTING formats to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Maybe ext2/3/4 already has what you need while allowing a relatively small driver, too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Limits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FATX#Derivatives (only FAT+ as used on some DR variants might be a bit useful) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2 (ext3/ext4 are more complex) Even a more complete UDF implementation might be cool for flash next to DVD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format Plus some other filesystems which seemed "too licensed" or too complex and too feature rich to me, so start reading as above. For example ZFS & Btrfs are probably too comprehensive for DOS. For general FS inspiration, a Be File System book and overview: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/ http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem.ars In short, I guess ext2 and HFS+ might be good choices for "being the next filesystem to have improved free DOS drivers available"? See also some already existing filesystem drivers for those two: http://www.catacombae.org/hfsexplorer/ http://www.ext2fsd.com/?page_id=2 which is downloadable from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/files/ http://uranus.chrysocome.net/linux/ext2ifs.htm http://www.ibiblio.org/filesystems/howto/Filesystems-HOWTO-6.html ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/filesystems/ext2/ Cheers, Eric PS: Level 3 of ISO9660 also sounds nice, do DOS drivers support it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660 PPS: Does anybody still have a new copy of the ext2 DOS "LTOOLS"? The download is no longer available after 18 years due to EOL. The http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/utils/dos/ copy is old, from 2001. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
