On Fri, 10 Aug 2001, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

> > > excellent "PC-style" solution. instead of using some sort of flash
> > > designed filesystem the controller does lot of stupid job emulating normal
> > > drive and spreading writes.
> >
> > So you'd rather we have to write write this special filesystem for NetBSD,
> > and all the other free OS projects have to devote effort to the same, than
> > we just use filesystem code we've already got? That seems a bit silly.
> > Why make everybody implement something multiple times when you can just
> > implement it once at a lower level? I think this is a much better solution
> > than a custom filesystem.
> no it isn't. the software people are just too lazy in these companies

This response doesn't even make sense. I was discussing NetBSD, FreeBSD,
etc. What companies are you talking about? And why do you feel that
they're too lazy? And what do you propose to be a better solution that
involves less overall effort or is much cleaner in some way?

I think even from a design point of view it's not clean to have a separate
filesystem specifically designed for flash cards. The rewrite problem
is only a problem with this particular hardware, therefore this hardware
should deal with it. Moreover it's a problem that might go away completely
in the future, and it would be a shame to be stuck forever with some weird
filesystem that avoids rewriting when it's no longer necessary to do that.

As for using the MS-DOS filesystem, well, it's a sensible decision if
you want as many things as possible to be able to read things on your
storage device. The huge portability advantage is pretty compelling in
an application like this, where you expect to have literally hundreds
of different operating systems using it.

Anyway, this seems to be getting a bit off-topic, so I've redirected
followups just to me.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>  +81 3 5778 0123   de gustibus, aut bene aut nihil
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