Dear Bret, you are a smart guy, but - as Eric already wrote - >> actually BLOCK drivers are only suitable for making >> FAT partitions on non-BIOS drives (e.g. USB) usable
device drivers are useful only for FAT systems. am 5. Oktober 2015 um 16:32 schrieben Sie: >> actually BLOCK drivers are only suitable for making >> FAT partitions on non-BIOS drives (e.g. USB) usable >> by DOS. For other filesystems, you would use other >> interfaces: CDEX / network redirector API, as used >> for ISO9660 CD/DVD and for VMWare in VMSMOUNT :-) > Not necessarily. Whatever the non-native file system is (exFAT, > ext?, NTFS, or whatever, including FAT32 in the case of older > versions of DOS) there are two ways to do it in DOS -- a device > driver or via the network redirector (I'll refer to the network > redirector ans an Installable File System or IFS here, even though it isn't > technically correct). > A device driver has the advantage of being able to leverage the > code already built into the kernel right. for FAT file systems. the kernel has no code for exFAT, EXT2, ... > which already understands where > the metadata is and what it means (the FAT table(s)), and also where > the user data is and how to access and modify it. A device driver > also has the advantage of basic inherent compatibility with common > DOS utilities there is simply no 'basic inherent compatibility' > and processes like INT 25h/26h, wow. this is exactly trivial. > caching (at least DOS > caches like SMARTDRV, not necessarily disk caches like LBACACHE), assuming you would even know the difference > DEFRAG, CHKDSK, and others (FORMAT and especially FDISK are a little > different and can't be leveraged as easily). plain nonsense. > .... > I don't know enough detail about how any of the file systems work > (even the basic FAT ones) to know for sure, right. > but the different file > systems may be similar enough that it's possible to virtualize them they are not. not even close. Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
