To: opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
Subject: [opendos] Filesystems
Message-ID: <19970204.171826.4847.4.chambersb@juno.com>
From: chambersb AT juno DOT com (Benjamin D Chambers)
Date: Tue, 04 Feb 1997 20:17:05 EST
Sender: owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
Precedence: bulk

Well, I'm getting tired of 3mil threads with the same title, so I'm
carrying this one to a new subject...
Anyways, would it be possible to contain some sort of IFS object at the
beginning of a partition?  That is, the kernel would see the partition,
load the driver from the beginning of it into memory the first time that
partition is accessed, after no accesses for a while the driver would be
dumped from memory, et cetera et cetera...

Now, as long as the driver code is, say, under 1 meg than most people
shouldn't mind having it there - even if it's duplicated on another
drive.  The beauty is you can pull and plug it on another machine, with
no new drivers, as long as that machine has OD.

I _think_ it could even be made to simulate FAT drives transparantly to
any program made to use FAT.  The only problems I can think of are
programs that modify sectors directly - which, IMHO, are very dangerous
and should be treated carefully.

The dynamic loading/unloading has already been implemented for object
files in DJGPP, the DLM project has done this successfully. 
Unfortunately, I lost the url for the main page.

Any thoughts???

...Chambers