ncoverby@ndsuvax.UUCP (Glen Overby) (07/29/89)
In article <20349@louie.udel.EDU> VBRANDT%DBNUAMA1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu writes: > ... recently I asked if the PC and ST versions of Minix were media >compatible. Well, they're not. And they shouldn't be! Filesystems are the wrong format to use to obtain media compatability. They provide random access to files, which is not necessary for interchanging data between systems. Instead, filesystems were ment to be used on one architecture of machine (or even one type of device) in the most efficent manner possible. When you want to move your data, use a more appropriate format, such as tar or cpio. After all, it would be foolish to use a Berkley Fast Filesystem on a floppy-disk based PC. This is possibly saying that the Minix distribution format might be better changed to something like tar or cpio. After all, a good portion of it is already in compressed "ar" archives. A boot disk would still be required, and binaries could just as well be put on filesystems since they are already rather system dependent. Device drivers are the wrong place to put filesystems. The device driver abstraction is a "raw" media -- it's only form is randomly accessed blocks. What you need is in the next level up, a filesystem. I expect that you can solve your problem with the "readfs" utility. It should be easy to modify it to take into account the byte ordering of the filesystem being read. -- Glen Overby <ncoverby@plains.nodak.edu> uunet!ndsuvax!ncoverby (UUCP) ncoverby@ndsuvax (Bitnet)