In article <713720748snx@crynwr.com> nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) writes:
quoted text
> Hey, here's a cool idea I had yesterday: Make a Linux filesystem
> driver that puts its filesystem in a file on an MS-LOSS partition.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there are several people, who already
had this idea. No shiny new patents .. ;-)

Seriously: half of it is already there. The other half will be missing
until the variable block size code is completed. The first half is the
loop devices patch, that makes it possible to mount regular files on
file systems that support bmap as file systems.

Unfortunately, MS-DOS arranges its clusters in such an odd way, that
bmap can't be used on hard disks and on some floppies. But it works
with the old 360k (and I think also 1.2MB) format. If you have the
loop devices patch installed, you can try something like this:

# mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /fd   # there's a 360kB floppy in /dev/fd0
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/fd/file bs=1k count=350
# mkfs /fd/file 350
# mount /fd/file /mnt

- Werner
-- 
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  / Werner Almesberger, ETH Zuerich, CH      almesber@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch /
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