drowning in a sea of unfamiliar code

Michal Schulz informed me of the existence of fdsk.device, which is basically a loopback device - a way to mount filesystem images.

The interface is a little unwieldy, but its quite usable. I’ve put vdisk.device into mothballs for a while, though I did have it very close to working. I might bring it back to life some time in the future, or at least extend fdsk.device with some of the ideas I have. Its not a high priority for me right now, as the point of this whole exercise was to build a filesystem.

I’ve started looking through the FreeBSD msdosfs code, to try to get a feel for it. Amazingly I’d forgotten just how bad POSIX code can be - the Amiga interfaces really are pleasant to read and use. Anyway, I’ve pretty much decided that trying to get the raw BSD files to compile and be usable is going to take at least as much effort as writing the filesystem from scratch, cutpasting the useful bits, so I’ve settled on the latter. In theory it’ll produce cleaner code, possibly at the expense of some stability. I’m not bothered - I learnt the hard way that readable code beats just about everything. You can fix bugs and stabilise things later, but if you can’t read it you don’t stand a chance.

All this means I’ve lost some time last night and this morning, so I’ve only stubbed the startup code for the handler, but I’m hoping in a few days I’ll be able to read a floppy image.