LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 14:19:17 +0930

Re: Toshiba slimline laptop CD-reader choice

On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 09:58:33AM +0930, Anthony Symons wrote:
> Alan Kennington wrote:
> > So I looked in on minix file system file:
> > 
> > --------------------------------------------------
> > emu soft/suse# file net-mod
> > net-mod: Minix filesystem, 30 char names
> > 
> > emu soft/suse# mount ./net-mod ./net -t minix -o loop
> 
> > And then I thought - now I'll just collapse this minix
> > file system that I've mounted and modified back into
> > a file. But... how on earth do you turn a minix file system
> > into a file?
> 
> Correct me if im missing something, but if you mount the file on a
> loopback, and then write to it, dont you just unmount it, and your done?
> 
> Ant


Since I "knew" that that was impossible, I didn't even try it.
Now I've tried it. And for some explicable reason, it works!
Life is wierder than I thought.
Thanks for that.

Strangely, though, the "frozen" file system file still has the
same modification-date and size. 
I had thought that the files system was copied into RAM or something,
and only modified there. 
It seems now like all of the kernel buffering layer is
where the read/writing occurs, and that this must
actually be written through to the real file, just like a
normal file system.

Now I can stick the new module onto a modules-disk for the
boot disk to read in.

On a related topic, do you happen to know how to _create_ a
minix file system as a file?
I can see how to use mkfs.minix to create a minix file
system in a disk partition and then copy it to a file with "dd".

I've created iso9660 file systems as files before, of course,
for CD writing. But there seems to be a paucity of tools for
_creating_ file systems - in the SuSE distributions at least.

I guess I could make copies of existing minix file-system files,
and just clear them out and put my own files in.
But that's very clumsy indeed.
And I don't really want to re-partition a hard disk every time
I want to create a minix file-system file.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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