On Sat, 11 Apr 1998, Bill Studenmund wrote:

> On Sat, 11 Apr 1998, David A. Gatwood wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Michael R Zucca wrote:
> > 
> > > Well, we'd need three more things:
> > > 
> > > - The ability to partition a drive using MacOS style partitions from
> > >   NetBSD.
> > >   This requires some additions to the kernel.
> > 
> > What sort of additions?  Is this the "writing disklabels" discussion
> > again?  Is there an ioctl or anything to force NetBSD to re-read the
> > partition table?  If there were, is there any chance pdisk could be
> > ported?
> 
> The problem is that NetBSD can only really deal with one partition type at
> a time. Well, each port has its own scheme (some can support a "NetBSD"
> and a "Vendor OS" table format). The better thing would be for us to be
> able to support many formats in one system. Then all ports could read
> MacOS tables, Atari tables, MBR, etc...
> 
> > > - The ability to access HFS partitions in some manner.
> > >   A special program built around a read-only HFS module (like the old HFS
> > >   program) could be used for install purposes. Though a full-blown file
> > >   system would be nice.
> > 
> > You want to talk about bizarre... I looked in the Mach Kernel from MkLinux
> > in the hopes of porting that (read-only) HFS code to NetBSD....  It's
> > literally a wrapper around hfsutils.  The Mach Kernel apparently has a
> > means of accessing a filesystem on a file-by-file basis w/o knowing about
> > the structure of the filesystem... and that takes advantage of it.  No
> > chance that NetBSD has any capability like that, is there?
> 
> NetBSD has the same type of setup. They're called vnodes. :-)

Always wondered what vnodes were referring to.

> I thought hfsutils had some sort of licensing restriction...

I think it does, which is why my jaw dropped a good food when I saw what
looks to be hfsutils embedded, essentially intact minus the main (ifdef'ed
out) with a bunch of interface code.  I could be wrong, and it could be
something totally different, but that's what it _looked_ like... and I'm
pretty sure there was a copyright notice indicating portions of the code
were from hfsutils, etc.  I'd be happy to email anybody interested a copy
of the relevant files, if I can find them again.


David

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