FS impl.

[David Parfitt]

Hi -
  Thank you all for the suggestions - I have a long weekend of hacking
ahead of me :-)

Thanks again -
David

On 5/6/05, Stephan Uphoff <ups at tree.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 16:01, Kip Macy wrote:
> > On Fri, 6 May 2005, David Parfitt wrote:
> >
> > > Hi -
> > >   I have been trying to write my own UFS-like filesystem
> > > implementation for fun. I had read somewhere that UFS was developed in
> > > user space (correct me if I'm wrong on that one) and then moved over
> > > to kernel-space. I was wondering if there are any existing facilities
> > > in the kernel source tree that would allow me to develop an fs in user
> > > space easily or with a little tweaking? As of right now, I have to
> > > develop, compile, panic, reboot, debug etc. which is frustrating and
> > > time consuming.
> >
> >
> > I can't speak for user-space utilities, but using xen as a development
> > environment would dramatically shorten the panic and reboot cycle. In addition,
> > you don't require a 2nd machine to debug with GDB. Just a thought. If booting
> > Linux makes you itch, NetBSD support for acting as the control plane is supposed
> > to be stable.
> 
> I agree.
> 
> I used this approach with vmware a while ago and was more than happy.
> >From what I see xen reboots are even faster (I only tried Xen with
> NetBSD and linux so far). Hopefully Kip's work will make it into current
> before I need a setup like this for FreeBSD.
> 
> An alternative would be a fast booting second machine with PXE (network)
> booting. (real server hardware takes forever to boot - use consumer
> boxes without ECC memory,SCSI, memory test,...)
> 
> Things have changed a bit since UFS was developed making development in
> user space more difficult due to extra functionality that would need to
> be ported/emulated to/in user space.
> There is also no pressure to do this since development in kernel space
> is so much easier these days.
> 
> This being said I highly recommend writing user space test applications
> that integrate modules/functions from your FS whenever possible.
> 
> Stephan
> 
>