Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/10/05:19:08
> From owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Sat Feb 8 05:27:40 1997
> To: opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
> Subject: Re: [opendos] Filesystems
> X-Juno-Line-Breaks: 0,2-9,15-25,28-30
> From: chambersb AT juno DOT com (Benjamin D Chambers)
> Date: Sat, 08 Feb 1997 00:01:41 EST
>
>
> On Fri, 7 Feb 1997 21:22:57 -0600 (CST) "Colin W. Glenn"
> <cwg01 AT gnofn DOT org> writes:
> >On Fri, 7 Feb 1997, Benjamin D Chambers wrote:
> >Also true, I just hope no-one comes up with a driver bigger than 120k,
> If it happens like this, I expect we'll start out with a few big drivers
> (say 60-80k) for the most common filesystems, then suddenly everyone will
> start pouring out their own FS's with their own (optimized) drivers (say,
> 10-20k, larger if the FS automagically implements compression (gasp! Did
NO, NO, NO, NO!
I have already lost 3 hard disks to compression and I do not intend to lose any
more.
Disk compression is EVIL!
Let me tell you a little tale....
Many years ago when I was just learning C, I wrote a little game using the BGI
system (didn't we all?).
Unfortunately, my sprite info got corrupted, and I ended up with an object
1 pixel wide and 2048 high, under cursor control.
In a fit of curiosity, I dangled it out the bottom of the screen.
Down out the screen, down through the ROMS, into the UMB and it speared my
SuperStor (came free with DR-DOS 6!!) driver straight through the heart.
Superstor's last dying action was to turn my hard disk into one file called
£"$%"£$%"£ which was 1gb long. (This was a 40mb MFM disk)
This was the logical drive. On the physical drive, I did inspect the remains
of the superstor drive, which was a big long file full of LZW data.
Therefore I could not recover my disk, and the only recourse was to remove the
file and start again.
I used superstor twice after that, lost both of the disks to various software
crashes and never touched superstor again.
> I just write what I think I did???)). Because the basic API would be the
> same, we'd end up with hundreds of compatable FS's - BEAT THAT, M$!!! :)
I assume we use FAT for removable disks, otherwise we will have hundreds of
incompatible floppy disks.
>
> >the
> >smaller the better. Better yet, instead of dumping the driver, what
> >about
> >caching the driver? That way you don't have the driver reinitialize
> >itself, it's ready to do! (This assumes the system uses the driver in
> >Protected Mode with a smart enough swapmanager.)
>
> Can you run a PM driver while the OS remains in RM? Nifty >:-)
Could cause problems if you run Ultima 7 or some demos with wierd memory
managers.
>
> Problem, though: I haven't coded anything REMOTELY similar to this. How
> feasible is it, really? Anyone (I mean who has (pseudo)experience with
> things of this nature) know whether or not this might work?
>
> ...Chambers
>
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