everything old is new again

This morning I checked in rewritten fat.handler directory code that uses the new cache. The code is now much cleaner, and I hope more readable. At the very least its well commented and I can read it, and so can work on it. In terms of features, nothing has changed from before (except that you’ll now get masses of debug information). Its an important first step though.

The next step is to rip out struct Extent and replace with naive calls to the cache. The original point of extents (and libDeviceIO) was to make it easy to request multiple disk blocks in one IO request, which enables the disk driver and/or the disk itself to optimise the request. This ability was removed when I switched over to using the block cache. I will be bringing it back later as its basically a required feature, but it makes the code more complicated. For now I just want a nice, clean naive implementation.

Following that struct ExtFileLock and the locking code will get an overhaul, which will probably lead to the packet handling code getting some work as well. All this is good. Once the entire filesystem is in a clean and stable state I’ll begin work on write support. While not simple it will be vastly easier with the new code than it was before, as I’m trying to design things with writing in mind.

In other news, I was digging through old hard drives last week and found my port of JJFFE to AROS that I did a couple of years ago during my previous dive into AROS. I released the code not expecting to work on it again, but then Kalamatee did some great work to make the window resizable (though the changes make the whole thing unusable in hosted; might be a problem in AROS’ X11 graphics code). That was enough to make it interesting to me again, so I’ll probably keep it as a side project for when I need to clear my head. I’ll set up a repository for it somewhere shortly.

Holidays are coming. I’m off on a camping trip this weekend (the Easter long weekend), and then taking two weeks off work from the 16th, and going away on the 21st and 22nd for my anniversary and birthday. By the end of the month I should be well rested and have a clear head. Of course work is still going to be insane, thats just the deal this year, but at least I’ll have had a chance to reset. I’ll be writing lots more code during the long break, I expect :)