In article <1992Aug14.174026.3032@bernina.ethz.ch> almesber@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch (Werner Almesberger) writes:
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>In article <713720748snx@crynwr.com> nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) writes:
>> 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.

Actually I've got working user space block device code that will
do just this. No one had expressed any interest so I was holding
onto it until I could find some compress code to make a compressed
file system. However if someone wants to try this I can set it up
to work with .97 and send them the device driver and some sample
programs.

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>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

The way the user space driver works this shouldn't be a problem.
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