buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) (12/16/88)
Thanks to all those who responded to my recent questions about the File System Switch. Today a related question arose about Unix filesystems on WORM drives. As I understand it, the FSS abstracts the logical structure of various types of file systems on basically the same physical type device (read/write magnetic disk). At first glance, it seems that a WORM drive would have no problem with matching the logical structure of a normal System V filesystem, but accessing it in the same physical pattern would be a performance disaster. It also seems like this should be a well studied problem. Could someone refer me to appropriate Usenix papers, or more general discussions of WORM filesystems? What commercial products (if any) allow mounting a Unix filesystem on a WORM drive? Is it possible to mount a WORM filesystem under Unix without making any kernel modifications (and have some type of reasonable result/performance)? That is, are we tied to a given vendor's version of Unix, or can we take our driver with us? -- A. Lester Buck ...!uhnix1!moray!siswat!buck