Hi, Mike.

-=> Mike Bilow spaketh unto Andrew Clegg <=-

 MB> Sorry about the ambiguous phrasing.  What I mean is that there is at
 MB> present no code in CDFS to support Rockridge, but that it would be a
 MB> good idea for IBM to change CDFS to put it in.

I thought that's what you meant, but it's best to check... But yes, I
agree, after all it is supposed to be a standard.

 MB> I have never really played with TVFS.  For whatever reason, the file
 MB> system is one of those components which makes me uneasy to play with
 MB> too much.

Perfectly understandable, that's why I'm reluctant to look at something
like Zipstream (even though space gets tight from time to time). TVFS in
theory should be fairly safe, as being a virtual FS you don't (AFAIK) have
TVFS-formatted drives, just a TVFS virtual drive that you mount all your
other partitions on.

 MB> The OS/2 IFS uses a completely different architecture from that of a
 MB> Unix file system.  There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly
 MB> historical, that are not worth going into.  In any case, an IFS is
 MB> technically a 16-bit Ring 0 DLL that exports a set of reserved names. 
 MB> The kernel calls into the DLL using these function names and expects
 MB> certain behavior.  Numerous enhancements have been piled onto this
 MB> basic structure to allow direct communication and callbacks between
 MB> an IFS and a DMD, mostly for performance or security reasons.   --

It's beginning to sound like one of those things that really ought to have
been redesigned years ago, rather than just heaping new features onto an
old architecture. I've talked to a few people about it though and the
general consensus is that IBM have (at the moment at least) stopped IFS
development completely.

This was prompted by actually encountering a case of the Rockridge problem,
I tried to give someone a copy of Linux from CD but on looking at the CD
from OS/2 we realised it would be pointless, all the names would be mangled
beyond recognition.

Andrew.

// Sig++                           andrew{at}donor2.demon.co.uk

--- LoraBBS-OS/2 v2.40b4 (Eval.)