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LynxFS - a LynxOS Filesystem Driver

Introduction

This is a LynxOS filesystem driver based on FUSE. This driver mounts a LynxOS filesystem as a loopback. It is a bit lazily written, it loads the entire filesystem image into RAM and operates on the image in memory. Since LynxOS is an embedded operating system, this should be good enough, since most images will be small.

Why is it?

I don't really know. I had no particular reason for writing it. I have no use for it. I've never used LynxOS, and I don't plan to. I think I just did it just to prove that I could.

TEST IMAGES REQUIRED

I need LynxOS disk images to test this driver. If you can provide one, please email me at lynxfs@anarres.org and tell me where I can get it. At the moment, I just get one email every 3 months, which reads, "OH HALP, TEH S**T IS IN TEH FAN, CAN UR DRIVER HALP US???!!" by which time it might be too late. If you send me a working, correct LynxFS image now, it's more likely that this driver will work for you when you need it. Who knows, if I get enough interest and help, I might even write a fsck/repair utility for LynxFS disks.

Implementation notes

This filesystem driver was written using the excellent guide to practical file system design which, although written with reference to the Be file system, describes enough of the BSD FFS structure to be applicable to LynxFS, which is nearly identical.

I'm pretty sure the driver works fine. It's read-only. I could probably implement read-write support, but I don't think I would find it interesting. Patches welcome, of course. If it doesn't work for you, please email me, and I'll fix it, there are naturally a number of things I'm not too sure about.

The driver was implemented entirely by intelligent guesswork. I don't have any way of creating LynxOS filesystems, so I can't do any extended testing. However, with all that, I'm pretty sure the code works, and will be fine.

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