2.6: future of UMSDOS?

2.6: future of UMSDOS?

[Adrian Bunk]

Looking at the state of the UMSDOS code in 2.6 I'm currently wondering 
about it's future.

Are there still potential users and people willing to work on getting it
working, or should it be removed from kernel 2.6?

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

Re: 2.6: future of UMSDOS?

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

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On Wed, 2004-05-19 20:43:21 +0200, Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>
wrote in message <20040519184321.GB24287@fs.tum.de>:
> Looking at the state of the UMSDOS code in 2.6 I'm currently wondering 
> about it's future.
> 
> Are there still potential users and people willing to work on getting it
> working, or should it be removed from kernel 2.6?

In my early Linux days, UMSDOS was quite a neat thing to have for
showing Linux to friends by placing a .zip'ed Linux installation on
their MS-DOS machines.

So for historic reasons, I think it would be nice to have UMSDOS around.

However, one can achieve the same (with a lot more work) by placing a
loop-mountable ext2 FS and start it from an initrd. Much more
complicated, not that flexible (loop-mounted files don't typically
grow:)

So, it's quite nice to have it (had), but there's no strong need to keep
it IMO.

MfG, JBG

-- 
   Jan-Benedict Glaw       jbglaw@lug-owl.de    . +49-172-7608481
   "Eine Freie Meinung in  einem Freien Kopf    | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg
    fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! |   im Irak!
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Re: 2.6: future of UMSDOS?

[Mark Beyer - Contractor]

Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:

>On Wed, 2004-05-19 20:43:21 +0200, Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>
>wrote in message <20040519184321.GB24287@fs.tum.de>:
>  
>
>>Looking at the state of the UMSDOS code in 2.6 I'm currently wondering 
>>about it's future.
>>
>>Are there still potential users and people willing to work on getting it
>>working, or should it be removed from kernel 2.6?
>>    
>>
>
>In my early Linux days, UMSDOS was quite a neat thing to have for
>showing Linux to friends by placing a .zip'ed Linux installation on
>their MS-DOS machines.
>
>So for historic reasons, I think it would be nice to have UMSDOS around.
>  
>
There are still embedded systems that boot from a DOS file system. Yes, 
there are better methods but for backward compatibility I wouldn't like 
to see it removed.

Re: 2.6: future of UMSDOS?

[Adrian Bunk]

On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 10:19:09AM -0700, Mark Beyer - Contractor wrote:
> Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, 2004-05-19 20:43:21 +0200, Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>
> >wrote in message <20040519184321.GB24287@fs.tum.de>:
> > 
> >
> >>Looking at the state of the UMSDOS code in 2.6 I'm currently wondering 
> >>about it's future.
> >>
> >>Are there still potential users and people willing to work on getting it
> >>working, or should it be removed from kernel 2.6?
> >>   
> >>
> >
> >In my early Linux days, UMSDOS was quite a neat thing to have for
> >showing Linux to friends by placing a .zip'ed Linux installation on
> >their MS-DOS machines.
> >
> >So for historic reasons, I think it would be nice to have UMSDOS around.
> > 
> >
> There are still embedded systems that boot from a DOS file system. Yes, 
> there are better methods but for backward compatibility I wouldn't like 
> to see it removed.

It's broken in 2.6.

Does anyone need it enough to fix it?

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

Re: 2.6: future of UMSDOS?

[aeriksson]

Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 10:19:09AM -0700, Mark Beyer - Contractor wrote:
> > Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
> > 
> > >On Wed, 2004-05-19 20:43:21 +0200, Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>
> > >wrote in message <20040519184321.GB24287@fs.tum.de>:
> > > 
> > >
> > >>Looking at the state of the UMSDOS code in 2.6 I'm currently wondering 
> > >>about it's future.
> > >>
> > >>Are there still potential users and people willing to work on getting it
> > >>working, or should it be removed from kernel 2.6?
> > >>   
> > >>
> > >
> > >In my early Linux days, UMSDOS was quite a neat thing to have for
> > >showing Linux to friends by placing a .zip'ed Linux installation on
> > >their MS-DOS machines.
> > >
> > >So for historic reasons, I think it would be nice to have UMSDOS around.
> > > 
> > >
> > There are still embedded systems that boot from a DOS file system. Yes, 
> > there are better methods but for backward compatibility I wouldn't like 
> > to see it removed.
> 
> It's broken in 2.6.
> 
> Does anyone need it enough to fix it?
> 


UMSDOS as-is, no not really, but I would like to see it ported to run
on top of smb. Being able to have an smb equivalent to nfsroot would
be really cool for disk space limited laptops and the like where you
want to run e.g. colinux. All you'd need is a vmlinuz file, a small
initrd file, and you're set to go. No need for
filesystems-on-big-files and such workarounds...

How much work would this take? I had a glance at the UMSDOS code and
it _seems_ rather light, but it's unchartered territory for me...

/A

Re: 2.6: future of UMSDOS?

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

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On Fri, 2004-05-28 11:03:44 +0200, aeriksson@fastmail.fm <aeriksson@fastmail.fm>
wrote in message <20040528090345.6C6913F04@latitude.mynet.no-ip.org>:
> Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 10:19:09AM -0700, Mark Beyer - Contractor wrote:
> UMSDOS as-is, no not really, but I would like to see it ported to run
> on top of smb. Being able to have an smb equivalent to nfsroot would
> be really cool for disk space limited laptops and the like where you
> want to run e.g. colinux. All you'd need is a vmlinuz file, a small
> initrd file, and you're set to go. No need for
> filesystems-on-big-files and such workarounds...

Well, I've done something like that in userspace. For mass installations
(hundreds to thousands of machines with no interaction, while only a
Windows machine is available in each location ...), I boot off with
kernel + ramdisk (containing needed device nodes and the minimal set of
smbfs binaries to mount the server), then symlinking everything from the
servers into my ramdisk.

This approach is somewhat limited (eg. it needs to fit on a single
floppy for re-installing a totally crashed box) because smbfs binaries
are somewhat large (if you don't cut them down manually:), but it works,
at least for installation.

I guess that UMSDOS' approach *could* in theory be made to work with any
filesystem capable of storing plain files, but that'll need some work,
though:)

MfG, JBG

-- 
   Jan-Benedict Glaw       jbglaw@lug-owl.de    . +49-172-7608481
   "Eine Freie Meinung in  einem Freien Kopf    | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg
    fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! |   im Irak!
   ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(NEW_COPYRIGHT_LAW | DRM | TCPA));

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