Simplest (practical) file system?

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Mon Jul 28 15:26:00 2003

At 12:27 PM 7/28/03 -0700, you wrote:
>> >lot. If you do a linear search for a free block, it may be that
>> you can rip
>> >through the 255-valued bytes quickly, but they have to be in
>> RAM, so you may
>> >have to do several reads to find what you want, which saps time.
>>
>>
>> I wonder if it really would sap a lot of time. Modern IDE drives have
>> large cache buffers so I would think that system could very
>> likely read the
>> data from the buffer. I'm thinking that as slow as these old systems are
>> and as fast as the modern drives are that it would be better to use a
>> simple and fast algorithim even if it means more drive accesses.
>>
>> Joe
>
>Joe, that is absolutely true. I was not considering the speed or caching
>abilities of the drive itself. I was thinking more generically of an
>approach that would work OK for both a sluggish floppy and a faster hard
>disk without software changes. Additional accesses penalize floppies, but
>that may not be an issue for Bob. --Patrick
>


   I'm also one of the people that's tinkering with the HP 1000s which are
the target systems.

   I think Bob only plans on using this for a hard drive. AFIK there's no
plans to develope a floppy drive systems for these computers (although it
would be nice).

   The biggest problem that I see here is that Bob wants to be able to use
this OS on systems that have as little as 16k words but still use LARGE
modern drives. I'm not sure that's practicle without a lot of wasting a lot
of drive space. But I frankly don't think wastage is a problem. There's
simply not a lot of software for this OS and I don't think we'd ever use
more than a tiny fraction of the drive. Therefore my vote ould be for
program size, speed and drive space effientcy in that order.

   FWIW A FAT table and MS-DOS file system would be nice for compatibility
but without a floppy drive it would probably be a waste. You COULD put the
drive into a PC and transfer files but I don't think that's likely.

   Joe
Received on Mon Jul 28 2003 - 15:26:00 BST