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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.misc:902 comp.os.386bsd.development:1194 Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.386bsd.development Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!utah-morgan!hellgate.utah.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) Subject: Re: AMIFS? (was: Re: BSD UNIX) Message-ID: <1993Sep7.163857.19661@fcom.cc.utah.edu> Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu Organization: Weber State University, Ogden, UT References: <SWILDNER.93Sep4145521@channelz.GUN.de> Date: Tue, 7 Sep 93 16:38:57 GMT Lines: 29 In article <SWILDNER.93Sep4145521@channelz.GUN.de> swildner@channelz.GUN.de (Sascha Wildner) writes: >There was some talk about the Amiga version of NetBSD here lately and I was >wondering if anyone has done an Amiga filesystem for i386-*BSD? Something >like PCFS but for Amiga disks. This would be difficult, if not impossible. There are several issues; the primary one is that the Amiga floppy drives are much more programmable than the PC drives -- and the default operational mode for Amiga disks is such that the PC controller can't be told to read them. A second issue is the byte order differences -- it may not be possible to make an AMIFS that will work on both PCs and Amigas (Amiga being the most desirable place to have the thing) without being able to hard-code byte order. This would be bad; in summary, even if you could talk to the hardware to read the data, it would be difficult to interpret it correctly. A PCFS for the Amiga would be no problem. Note that the MAC is similarly handicapped, but is even more variable than the Amiga -- it may be possible to read Amiga disks on the MAC without a great deal of trouble, but reading MAC disks on an Amiga or PC without better hardware will be impossible (the MAC can write disks that other machines can read, but doesn't by default). Terry Lambert terry@icarus.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.