Re: Floppy Handling

From: Jacques Richer (jricher@bankri.com)
Date: Wed Jun 14 2000 - 15:27:48 EST


James Sutherland wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Jacques Richer wrote:
>
> > Not to open a can of worms, but this looks like a job for a user mode
> > filesystem. I realize that there aren't any hooks for this in the
> > existing kernel, but it may be more productive to write these hooks,
> > and implement the code as a daemon than it would be to try to shoehorn
> > this thing into the kernel.
>
> I'd tend to agree here, I think - except for one aspect:
>
> I've been wanting similar functionality for a while for CD ROMs - when you
> insert a CD ROM, it would be cached into VM. If you have enough swap space
> free, after the first run through of a CD, the whole thing can be accessed
> at hard drive speeds. The problem is, we'd need some way to free up the
> cache as needed, which would probably be rather tricky.
>
> Has anyone else looked into anything similar?
>
> James.

1) If this were a user space daemon, how about monitoring free space on volume
with a user defined threshold. A drop belox threshold could Grim File Reap the
least recently used image file. This would only cause a problem with "df"
returning not-exacly-as-they-look disk usage numbers.

2) By putting the floppy disk drive handling code in user space, we can steal
^H^H^H^H^H borrow large pieces of the mtools libs and avoid reinventing the
wheel. At least that code is stable.

--
  Jacques
--
The packet goes out the card, into the copper,
 out the router, onto the fiber, across the world,
 through the copper......
             NOTHING BUT NET!

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