OSDev.org

gmoney wrote:i actually have support for ext2, sfs, and vfat. but like any os i would like a filesystem that complements my os. like linux-ext2, 3 and 4 or windows and fat12/16/32 and ntfs or even macintosh and hpfs (not sure if thats what its called). and to me its a learning process that will help me in the future.

So it's the basic idea of "branding"...

Windows, Linux and MacOS have their own filesystem since it adds something that the others don't add. For Windows and MacOS that's at the very least being the only one that can change the definition of it. For Linux it's Unix permissions & the exact features that ext2/3/4 have.

What does it add to your OS? If you're just in it for the branding, take ext2 and replace its magic number with yours.

Candy wrote:If you're just in it for the branding, take ext2 and replace its magic number with yours.

{rolling around on the floor, hands pressed to both temples}

"The pain! AAAARRG! I can't stand it! D4 P41N!"

Solar wrote:

Candy wrote:If you're just in it for the branding, take ext2 and replace its magic number with yours.

{rolling around on the floor, hands pressed to both temples}

"The pain! AAAARRG! I can't stand it! D4 P41N!"

Why?

Would you rather have to create a fully new filesystem driver for no reason other than that somebody wanted to make another one? I'd rather have improvement. The very next thing I expect to come out of this is either some real reason to make your own file system (which I fully expect to come - and he'll spend enough time on it then to do it well) or it's going to die out, as he can't mount it anywhere and will revert to just ext2.

There's technical reasoning and that little thing called politics

It's the excruciating pain trying to imagine the kind of mind that could actually come up with such an idea ("exchange the magic numbers so it's different from ext2fs").

Solar wrote:It's the excruciating pain trying to imagine the kind of mind that could actually come up with such an idea ("exchange the magic numbers so it's different from ext2fs").

Why? It's simple - he wants to have a filesystem that's pretty much ext2, except that it should be not ext2 so it's his filesystem. I'd use Occam's Razor to pick a solution that's the least amount of work that satisfies the requirements - take ext2 and make it just slightly different to make it not ext2. Then, modify at your leisure if you find something you want to change. Probably, the work involved in fixing tools to work with it is more than he'll want to do, so going the other way isn't too far away either.