Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!ukma!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!uhnix1!moray!siswat!buck
From: buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: mounting WORM filesystems
Keywords: WORM optical disk mount filesystem
Message-ID: <357@siswat.UUCP>
Date: 16 Dec 88 06:01:06 GMT
Organization: Photon Graphics, Houston
Lines: 24

Thanks to all those who responded to my recent questions about
the File System Switch.  Today a related question arose
about Unix filesystems on WORM drives.  As I understand it,
the FSS abstracts the logical structure of various types of file
systems on basically the same physical type device
(read/write magnetic disk).  At first glance, it seems that
a WORM drive would have no problem with matching the logical
structure of a normal System V filesystem, but accessing it
in the same physical pattern would be a performance disaster.
It also seems like this should be a well studied problem.

Could someone refer me to appropriate Usenix papers, or more
general discussions of WORM filesystems?

What commercial products (if any) allow mounting a Unix
filesystem on a WORM drive?

Is it possible to mount a WORM filesystem under Unix
without making any kernel modifications (and have some
type of reasonable result/performance)?  That is, are
we tied to a given vendor's version of Unix, or can we
take our driver with us?

-- 
A. Lester Buck		...!uhnix1!moray!siswat!buck