Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!ast
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Amiga Minix Questions (Floppy drives)
Keywords: floppy 68000 compatibility
Message-ID: <7647@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 18 Sep 90 19:03:42 GMT
References: <1990Sep17.115240.16619@warwick.ac.uk> <7583@star.cs.vu.nl> <1453@targon.UUCP>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam
Lines: 21

In article <1453@targon.UUCP> gert@targon.UUCP (Gert Kanis) writes:
>As someone pointed out in this newsgroup about a year ago  when we talk
>about how Minix writes on disk  we speak of File Systems.  There's no law
>that you should be able to read them across architectural boundaries.
>(Allthough it can be quite handy at times :-/ )

Yesterday, for the first time I successfully mounted an Amiga disk on a PC.
(I were a biologist, I'd probably be crossing a cat with a rabbit.)  However,
I was not able to read the Amiga disk (yet).  But the mount took.  That's a
start. 

This feature is not intended to read Amiga disks on PCs or vice versa, but
is needed because 2.0 will have a new and incompatible file system.  Posix
requires all three times, which means I have to go to a larger inode.  To
make upgrading possible, I have put a "file system switch" in the code, so
it dynamically senses the file system type (based on the magic number in
the superblock), and then converts from the external format to the internal 
one.  This means that you can have PC, 68000, and new style disks mounted
at the same time, for copying files from old to new disk partitions.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)