slow and steady

Work is absolutely insane at the moment so I come home very tired, which means I’m only getting an hour or two a day to work on AROS. Despite the glacial pace I’m pleased with the progress I’m making.

I’ve completed the buffer cache (though the write portion is currently untested) and rewritten fat.handler’s internal FS_GetBlock() function to use it. Its working just fine insofar as reading files is working. Its fairly mundane as there’s only one user of it, but as time goes on it’ll get more heavily used. I still have hopes for it eventually becoming a system-wide service (eg a cache.resource).

I’m currently pulling apart the rest of the code to remove all traces of its own caching, instead making it utterly dependant on the buffer cache. The first on the block is the directory code. DirCache and Extent code is being removed and the API is being changed to make it very much like the UNIX opendir() interface. You get a handle on a directory, and then call other functions to get individual entries, iterate over it, etc. This is much cleaner that what the handler had before, and the lessons learned here will serve well when cleaning up the other parts of the handler. At the end this will effectively have been a rewrite, but well worth it in my opinion.

I’m back in reading up on filesystems as well. I think the next thing I tackle once FAT is done (so still a way off) is ext2. It really is straightforward and I’ll be able to borrow most of the FAT code anyway if I do it right.

I really do hope to have something to demonstrate soon. I get next Friday through to Tuesday off for Easter, then back to work for three days, then two weeks off for the Christmas vacation I never had. That should give me plenty of time to cut code, even allowing for the camping trip and the anniversary :P