On 21 Jun 1998, Georges Heinesch wrote:

> I tested BFFS 1.5beta for a while now in writing mode and did not
> encounter any problems, except the NetBSD/fsck reports "MAKING FILE
> SYSTEM CLEAN" after AmigaOS accessed a NetBSD file system in writing.
> 
> Is this normal and/or unavoidable?

The filesystem is probably clean in most cases, but not marked as such,
because AmigaOS has no equivalent to the 'umount' command. It is therefore
impossible for NetBSD to find out whether the AmigaOS access to the
filesystem was stopped in a controlled way (by closing all files) or
perhaps by a system crash (possibly leaving some files open). And in case
of doubt it is safer to always run fsck.
Maybe it would be possible to implement some sort of control mechanism for
this in BFFS (e.g. by setting the clean flag automatically after closing
the last open file), but the current version seems not to include such
things.
 
> I also ran the AmigaOS/fsck version (which is included in the BFFS
> 1.5beta archive) after AmigaOS accessed a NetBSD file system in
> writing. It reported a couple of things but no error. My point was
> that it also didn't "fix" the file structure of the NetBSD file
> system, making a subsequent fsck (when NetBSD was started) still
> necessary.
> 
> Can't AmigaOS/fsck fix this inconsistency?

In most cases there is probably no inconsistency to fix. But even if
AmigaOS/fsck fixes some problems, NetBSD will run fsck again for the reason
explained above.

> However in reading, I encountered the following problems.
> 
> - "dir" is possible
> - "dir all" doesn't work properly. It stops with a "directory not
>    found" error.
> - "list all" works fine again.

This is probably caused by some symbolic links not being handled correctly.
Even "list all" stops in some cases with this error message. I did not test
this in great detail, but it is clear that not all symbolic links on NetBSD
partitions can be handled correctly by BFFS. Think, for example, of links
on '/usr' with absolute path names (beginning with '/') or links from '/'
to subdirectories of '/usr'. If '/usr' is located on a separate partition,
it is mounted below '/' on the NetBSD side, but "parallel" to it on the
AmigaOS side and, therefore, these links can't work on the AmigaOS side.

Regards,

Stefan Hensen

----------------------------------------------------------
Stefan Hensen
e-mail: hensen@wpos4.physik.uni-wuppertal.de