Flash File System

[Robin Kirkham]

On Thu, 12 Feb 1998, Joel Sherrill wrote:

> Any file system support added should ideally plug in between  standard
> layers like the tree-structure memory filesystem in Robin's words and a
> device driver interface.

Yes, this is what I have in mind.

> Does anyone know of a good starting point for this type of code?  VSTa,
> BSD, Linux, etc?  Remember that we don't want to pick up any licensing
> problems.  

I was thinking of something Plan-9-ish, where the "filesystem" is less of
a filesystem, but is more of a "namespace", where names can refer to files
(on disk or in memory), devices, tasks, network hosts, anything you can
write a driver to implement. VSTa, I believe, tries to do this, and so
might be a good starting point. Don't know a lot about it, though.

As for as BSD and Linux go, you might find Unix kernel code to be a little
profligate in its memory usage, and there might be underlying assumptions
about virtual memory (the latter could be true in VSTa).

> It would be nice to strive for a "community design" and start identifying
> the pieces.  

And I wouldn't shy away from coming up with something quite original.

Robin