Spectranet hard disk module
I figure it's about time for a public announcement now that people are starting to get their hands on spectranets.
Some of you will be aware that for some time I've been hacking away at a spectranet virtual filesystem module for IDE devices (hard disks and compact flash cards) and an API for implementing filesystem drivers to use them.
It's still far from being a usable implementation but it's getting there slowly (very slowly at the moment cause everyone keeps finding excuses not to help...)
The project is split up into two main parts:
1) The spectranet VFS module which handles idedos:// urls and contains all the hard disk driver code. This part is pretty close to being complete and can be compiled for the Simple 8-bit interface or the DivIDE (more devices can be added fairly easily provided they behave similarly)
2) The filesystem driver modules. These implement the actual filesystem on the hard disk partition, for example +3DOS or FAT. There's a very very bare skeleton driver for +3DOS at the moment which doesn't support any calls except unmount.
In addition there's a half finished partition manager which is a utility program written in C that uses the spectranet's "modulecall" system to invoke functions within the IDEDOS VFS module.
This post isn't a guarantee that it ever will be usable, but hopefully no-one else will start a competing driver and end up duplicating coding effort.
Ideally I would like to do a fully commented skeleton driver with all the calls paging the memory correctly etc but simply returning so that people can "fill in the blanks" to implement their favourite filesystem. It's likely that I will implement +3DOS because I can test my implementation against the +3e roms easily just by disabling the spectranet.
What this module won't do is work with IBM partitioned disks. It is designed around the IDEDOS partitioning scheme, however it will be able to share a disk with an IBM system just like the +3e can. I've also designed the filesystem module API in such a way that a module implementing a type 0x10 filesystem in idedos which is FAT can also declare that it implements IBM type 0x0b for example.
The idea is that a VFS module for IBM format hard disks could be written that implements the same API so that the filesystem drivers can be re-used.
Some of you will be aware that for some time I've been hacking away at a spectranet virtual filesystem module for IDE devices (hard disks and compact flash cards) and an API for implementing filesystem drivers to use them.
It's still far from being a usable implementation but it's getting there slowly (very slowly at the moment cause everyone keeps finding excuses not to help...)
The project is split up into two main parts:
1) The spectranet VFS module which handles idedos:// urls and contains all the hard disk driver code. This part is pretty close to being complete and can be compiled for the Simple 8-bit interface or the DivIDE (more devices can be added fairly easily provided they behave similarly)
2) The filesystem driver modules. These implement the actual filesystem on the hard disk partition, for example +3DOS or FAT. There's a very very bare skeleton driver for +3DOS at the moment which doesn't support any calls except unmount.
In addition there's a half finished partition manager which is a utility program written in C that uses the spectranet's "modulecall" system to invoke functions within the IDEDOS VFS module.
This post isn't a guarantee that it ever will be usable, but hopefully no-one else will start a competing driver and end up duplicating coding effort.
Ideally I would like to do a fully commented skeleton driver with all the calls paging the memory correctly etc but simply returning so that people can "fill in the blanks" to implement their favourite filesystem. It's likely that I will implement +3DOS because I can test my implementation against the +3e roms easily just by disabling the spectranet.
What this module won't do is work with IBM partitioned disks. It is designed around the IDEDOS partitioning scheme, however it will be able to share a disk with an IBM system just like the +3e can. I've also designed the filesystem module API in such a way that a module implementing a type 0x10 filesystem in idedos which is FAT can also declare that it implements IBM type 0x0b for example.
The idea is that a VFS module for IBM format hard disks could be written that implements the same API so that the filesystem drivers can be re-used.
Post edited by guesser on
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