[Info-vax] MOUNT and filesystems, was: Re: RMS record metadata, was: Re: Re; Spiralog, RMS Journaling (was

[Simon Clubley]

On 2016-06-26, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
> On 2016-06-26 12:43:28 +0000, Michael Moroney said:
>
>> File system support (other than relatively trivial transfer programs) 
>> in  VMS need some knowledge by MOUNT for it to even know what to do 
>> about a foreign format.  For the theoretical FAT32 filesystem, you'd 
>> need a /FAT32 paramater to tell MOUNT this is a FAT32 filesystem, for 
>> it to validate the filesystem and launch an ACP to deal with the file 
>> system.

IMHO, MOUNT should not be validating that filesystem; it should be asking
a previously registered FAT32 filesystem driver if the volume in question
contains a valid FAT32 filesystem.

>
> Wouldn't be the first time that dynamically-activated extensions or 
> callouts were used within OpenVMS or layered products, or ACPs for that 
> matter, and MOUNT does still has a largely-now-runt ACP-related 
> qualifier.
>

It would be a lot better if you could load and remove filesystems at
kernel level instead (in the same way that you can currently load a
device driver at runtime [but not remove it :-(]) and have the ODS-2/5
support just be yet another filesystem driver.

And yes, I know in reality that's going to be NuVMS territory only.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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