> Dave Jones wrote:
>> If you are asking if Linux as a guest of z/VM can write records to a
>> CMS file, the answer is no. Or am I completely missing your query?
...
Jack Woehr wrote:
> Nobody's written a CMS or BFS mountable file system for Linux on Z? Your
> lives would be easier if it were there, wouldn't it?
...
Jack --
Yes, CMS minidisks can be mounted on Linux just like NTFS partitions.
But it's not as smooth as it used to be.
I wrote a CMSFS package which reads the CMS minidisk filesystem, "EDF"
as it is properly called. It is a flat filesystem, but works just fine
and at one time was mountable on Linux. This goes back about 8 years.
This package is read only. I does not have CMS FS write support.
The package has two features: a user space utility and a filesystem
driver. The driver was actually part of the kernel source back in the
early days of 2.4 (kudos to Alan Cox), but my idealistic objectives (for
the package) ran counter to stylistic and maintainability needs of the
kernel developers (I presume) so it fell back out. But the driver was
still viable as a third party module up until 2.4.19 when things moved
more to "libfs". My purpose was to learn libfs, but I never did. So if
you have a 2.4 system, you can probably mount CMS minidisks directly.
(You cannot build the driver against newer kernel sources than 2.4.19.
Well, you can, but it will crash when it runs. But you can load a
2.4.19 based driver on some newer kernels. I know it works for 2.4.21.)
At one point, in a former life, I had EXT2 images as CMS files and would
loop-back mount those as /usr and /opt.
The utility still runs fine, and runs on other POSIX systems (notably
Solaris and CYGWIN). Some shops use it for production work. If you
just want to read a CMS file, no problem! Neither the utility nor the
driver have any SFS or BFS capability.
A colleague and former office mate once threatened to FUSE the driver.
To my knowledge he has not yet done that, thankfully. (I say that this
FS driver should be a kernel thing not a user space animal.) The big
advantage for the filesystem driver would be automounter enablement,
since the utility meets the needs of most current users.
The latest source is at
http://www.casita.net/pub/cmsfs/cmsfs-1.1.8d.tar.gz
I hope this helps.
-- R;
