Quoth Billy Harvey:
- What is needed is a program which when called will dd the image of the
- floppy just inserted into a file, in some specified location, perhaps
- /var/floppy-`date +%s`, for example. with ownership assigned to
- whomever did the calling.
-
- Once the dd is complete, the floppy must be removed, this file is then
- mounted using loopback. Removal of the floppy will force the newbie
- to realize that the data being operated on is not physically on the
- floppy.
-
- Once the work is complete, there is a similar reverse process, which
- can check to ensure that either a blank floppy or the same floppy is
- used, that will call for the floppy to be inserted, and then will
- dd the file back to the floppy, and then call for it to be removed.
-
- The image file can then be either automatically umounted and deleted,
- or alternatively marked in some way so that if it is kept mounted and
- further written to, it will be considered dirty, annotating a need for
- a further sync to the floppy.
I like the idea, but the dd takes too long. I'd hate to wait for 1440K to transfer just so I can access a 1K file--on read AND write. Perhaps if the file could be opened immediately so the user can get working and the dd is run in the background...It still seems like a lot of work. And what if the user did want to read off one disk, edit, and write to a new disk?
It strikes me that, to be consistent with the typical conceptual model a user has of the floppy, it might be more appropriate to perform a mount/read/umount to open a file. Saving a file would, of course, be a mount/write/umount procedure. This makes removing/swapping floppies between opens and saves safe and does so w/o any (much?) added complexity.
There is, certainly, the drawback that buffering writes to the disk becomes ipossible. But it achieves *predictability* for the user.
-Steve Holdener
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 15 2000 - 21:00:28 EST