On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Brian Wildasinn wrote:

> Yep, checked the distribution tree again and did another download of the above
> syssrc.tgz. It does _not_ have EXT2FS anywhere in the GENERIC or other conf/
> files. But it is in NetBSD-current:

Is ext2fs in sys/arch/mac68k/conf/files.mac68k? If so, then the option was
just left out of GENERIC. No big deal, other than obscuring how to get
that support. :-)

> but not in the 1.3.2 release. Does anyone know if there's maybe going to be an
> hfs_fs in a lkm or added as a supported filesystem in the kernel? There appears
> to be work in this regard for other unix kernels, but maybe due to the hughe
> waste of unused-unavailable blocks in large HFS partitions, is not useful? Or
> maybe HFS+ support in NetBSD would be time better spent?

I spent about three months working w/ Paul Goyette on porting an hfsfs to
NetBSD. We gave up when we ran into memory allocation problems - we were
using memory which had been freed.

The problem with all of the HFS modules at present is that they are GPL'd.
Thus they can't get into the kernel. They can get into an lkm, but not the
kernel. The main reason given is Microsoft. No one wants to make the code
which will end up in WindowsMac or something like that.

I ended up deciding to work on serial ports, and Paul (I guess :-) on
SLOTMAN. :-)

> Would it be better to hard code in a low-level booter for system info of the
> various hardware and ditch having to fuss with HFS at all? I became aware of HFS
> shortcommings when my 1k files grew to 32k when transferred to a new gig
> harddrive, and only managed to sqeeze them down to 2k by making 7 or 8 HFS
> partitions. And you know, in macos that means copying and deleating, unlike the
> automatic deleate in unix' mv command.
> 
> BTW, but I went from 20megs to 16megs of RAM just booting from macOS to NetBSD.
> Where'd that 4 megs go? (I think macOS with all extensions off is about 1.4
> megs and about 4 megs when lots of extensions and controll panels are booted.)
> Is memory size another option to check in compiling my own kernel?

How are you judging the memory loss?

You should be letting the booter auto-size RAM. Memory size is not
directly a kernel parameter.

Take care,

Bill