Hi Mark!

In message <Pine.SGI.3.91.970103183251.6145M-100000@physig4.ph.kcl.ac.uk>
          Mark Brinicombe <amb@physig.ph.kcl.ac.uk> wrote:

> Ok one problem that does exist is the partition table. RiscBSD does not
> understand MSDOS partition tables.
> Although there is an MSDOSFS filesystem it needs the actual partition the 
> filesystem is on.

OK so it's not working. This was not clear to me as it was unclear if there
wasn't somebody who had it working, especially because somebody claimed that it
should be working some time ago.

> With floppies there is no partition table as the whole floppy is always 1
> MSDOS filesystem so these can be mounted.

But that's a big disadvantage! I'd really like to have swap on my floppies,
too. ;-)))

> Harddiscs etc. that have partition tables will give problems as RiscBSD
> does no understand MSDOS partitions and thus cannot implement them so all 
> you all you have is the /dev/xx?c which is always the whole disc.
> What needs to be done is the disksubr.c code in sys/arch/arm32/arm32 should
> be extended to recognise a MSDOS partition and to fake a disklabel that 
> describes the DOS partitions.
> 
> Really this should perhaps be MI somewhere rather than MD as this is not 
> just a problem from RiscBSD.

I recall some talk on one of the NetBSD mailinglists a few months ago. I think
they were discussing what was needed to read a NetBSD/xxx disk on NetBSD/yyy.
I think more interchangeability of disks would be a good thing generally.
Ideally this should go as far as reading and writing ext2fs partitions under
NetBSD. The OpenBSD people seem to have this in their pipeline, it would be
great to use this for NetBSD too once it's available.

I want to take home (and keep up to date) largish amounts of stuff from the
Fachhochschule. There are only Intel boxes, most with Linux, some with FreeBSD
on them. The best interchangeable thing to handle long filenames ATM is VFAT,
but I can't mount the PD VFAT medium under NetBSD and RiscOS doesn't use long
filenames.
There should really be a decent filesystem which can be handled by all free
Unix variants. I don't really care if it's ext2fs or ffs, I just want to
exchange data.
I think the largest problem here is the handling of a dozen different disk
layouts and the usual copyright issues: BSD can't use GPLed code in their
kernel and the Linux people aren't eager to use stuff under BSD copyright. Sigh.

Btw, does anybody know how well Linux performs, ie. can you handle a Linux/i386
disk on Linux/alpha or even Linux/arm?

So long, Markus