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

[David Froble]

Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.
> 

Not so fast ....

If VSI is developing a new file system, and the road map says they are, they are 
also going to run into this problem.  So they will:

1) Add another file system where required

2) Do the design and work to allow what you're asking