| I used to support FAT32 and FAT12, but I removed it because of patent threats and created my own file system. It's a simple as I could thing of -- bitmap for cluster allocation, only contiguous files and fixed- length directory entries. You cannot grow files. A LoseThos partition on a hard disk is marked as a FAT32 type, but cannot be read from other operating systems. (You are welcome to add it to other operating systems -- no license required.) I marked it FAT32 because I'm using a recovery partition on my PC to duel boot and it only works if it's marked FAT32. To transfer files to and from LoseThos, burn a CD-ROM. I don't have documentation on CD-ROM writing and one of my CD-ROM drives burns disks readable with LoseThos, but not Windows. Be aware that LoseThos files with names ending in "Z" are stored compressed. (THEY ARE NOT ENCRYPTED!) To uncompress Move() or Copy() them to names without a 'Z' or vice versa. Here is a Window's tool available for uncompressing all files ending in 'Z' in a directory tree. LTZ.exe At the Window's command line type
If you wish to strip ASCII 5 (cursor position) and ASCII 31 (shift space) enter
AddDrives() is available from the command line to mount drives. When you recompile the "kernel" you are prompted the same questions. LoseThos is intended to be friendly to people who want to poke around in the kernel. You can make your own file system, if you are so inclined -- LoseThos is about programming as a hobbiest. LoseThos is not designed for multimedia. It is oriented toward reading and writing whole files. This is probably blasphemy for a lot of old- school programmers. Advantages of whole files include checksums, compression and contiguous disk requests. It supports a variant of PrintF() which goes to a document in RAM which you can grow and save to disk. LoseThos allows direct block access. You can make database applications that are pretty smoking, but you probably can't use it as a server. It doesn't have virtual memory and is easy to crash. You could experiment with intelligent pre-fetching of disk blocks. LoseThos files are stored contiguously, so it's pretty fast reading and writing, but it doesn't use DMA. I just didn't feel like adding it. I added it for floppies, but not hard disks. (My floppy required it.) The point I think many are missing is that users are supposed to tinker with the operating system. I intentionally sacrificed efficiency for simplicity in many cases. |
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