Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!phigate!philica!adrie
From: adrie@philica.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Minix reading/writing non-Minix file systems (SunOS?)
Message-ID: <684@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Date: 10 Oct 90 07:57:23 GMT
References: <32883@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Reply-To: adrie@beitel.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Organization: Philips TDS, Innovation Centre Aachen
Lines: 33

In article <32883@nigel.ee.udel.edu> pezely@cis.udel.edu (Daniel Pezely) writes:
>Wouldn't it be convienent if machines running Minix, which had a file
>system on a SCSI drive, could read Berkeley (or even SunOS) file systems?
>
>First of all, would that be legal?  (Assuming the site had a BSD,
>SunOS, AT&T, etc license, of course.)

I see no reason why it could be illegal to read or write to a Unix file
system.

>But more importantly, how difficult would that be to pull off?

I've thought about providing a utility program, like dosdir/read/write,
to let the SparcStation Minix manipulate the SunOS file systems on floppy
and hard disks. I've not written such a program (yet), because it's not
entirely trivial and one can always use tar to transfer files from SunOS
to Minix (and the other way around), via floppy diskettes or a dummy
hard disk partition.

Mounting a SunOS file system under Minix would be quite difficult. In any
case, the Minix FS should be changed on many places and you're just
changing one specific file system format (Minix) to another (SunOS).
For another Unix like file system, you'll probably have to change again!

>It would be nice to be able to just take an external drive off of a
>SparcStation and slap it on, say, a 386, then use it and put it back.

In this example, you'll probably get problems with the endianess of the
Sparc (hi-byte-first) and the 386 (lo-byte-first). Note that it could be
done, but you will have to do quite some rewriting on the FS!

Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl)
Philips Innovation Centre Aachen