OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Storage
HPFS and JFS internal definition specifications
Doug Bissett:
--- Quote ---I contacted Arca Noae about this time last year when I was moving forward toward writing my open source OS/2 kernel replacement. They were very non-receptive to the idea and it was a difficult email exchange over a week or two.
--- End quote ---
Well, first off, the kernel is not likely to be a short term project, and AN doesn't have the manpower to manage such a project over the longer term. If you want to do that, and present them with a working kernel, I expect that they would look at it. The main problem being that it would not be certified to the required standards, demanded by many of their customers. I doubt if there are enough OS/2 users left to be able to pull that off. It is also much more important to add things like USB 3.x and WiFi, in the short term, so that people can actually use the product. AN do need to get the basic OS running well enough to keep their customers happy, and that must be done in the short term, with very limited manpower. It must also be done with no possibility that somebody else will claim that their work was copied, or, they need a complete disclaimer that all work is original, and they have full access to whatever is presented to them. They do have contracts with IBM, other software vendors, and customers, that need to be followed. They cannot take any chances on something like a new kernel, that may, or may not, work as expected, in all cases (and they do understand just how difficult that project would be - I wonder if you understand that). It is difficult enough to get enough testing done on things like NIC drivers, to keep customers happy. Writing software is only the beginning of what needs to be done to add parts to a commercial product that may be used in military, and health care, situations, where no failures can be tolerated. Small steps are necessary, to keep OS/2 alive, in the short term, and there aren't enough people to do long term projects, never mind get them certified.
To write a new kernel, you need to start with a description of ALL of the things that you expect it to do. I honestly doubt if anybody on earth could describe all of the things that the OS/2 kernel does. If the new kernel is not 100% compatible, it really cannot be called "OS/2" (in fact, AN uses the name ArcaOS because IBM forbids using "OS/2"). A new kernel that can run OS/2 programs would probably be accepted by a lot of users, but the main, core, customers would not be able to use it until it is properly certified.
RickCHodgin:
--- Quote from: Doug Bissett on June 02, 2017, 05:58:55 pm ---
--- Quote from: Rick C. Hodgin ---I contacted Arca Noae about this time last year when I was moving forward toward writing my open source OS/2 kernel replacement. They were very non-receptive to the idea and it was a difficult email exchange over a week or two.
--- End quote ---
Well, first off, the kernel is not likely to be a short term project, and AN doesn't have the manpower to manage such a project over the longer term...
--- End quote ---
To be clear, I wasn't asking them to be involved with the project in any way, but was asking for some information, general help, guidance as to where to begin, etc., basically just as fellow members of the community.
I also never intended for it to be binary compatible. It would become the root of a new open source OS/2 derivative that I have been calling ES/2. It would be designed around every feature of OS/2 at its core (at least those that are publicly available), to produce an extremely similar environment to that of OS/2, but it would be its own off-shoot, kind of like how Linux is like UNIX, but it is not UNIX and there are distinct differences.
I still want to do that project. I was telling my wife last night that if I had resources to do all the things I want to do, I would manage all of them, but the one thing I would personally write the bulk of the code for would be the kernel. The rest of them I would write guidance and frameworks, but not details of the code.
Thank you,
Rick C. Hodgin
RickCHodgin:
--- Quote from: Rick C. Hodgin on June 02, 2017, 02:07:14 pm ---
--- Quote from: Martin Iturbide on June 02, 2017, 02:03:06 pm ---I restored the original fig5 and fig6 from the original source on the HPFS article. I don't what if the optimized images got list or maybe never was finished. I will check on that.
--- End quote ---
...I'll go ahead and create some new optimized images and you can update them when completed.
--- End quote ---
Emailed to you. Taken from the link: Google Patent #EP0416445A2
Thank you,
Rick C. Hodgin
Martin Iturbide:
Hi Rick.
My suggestions about file systems are the one that I posted. If I will have to put those (HPFS, Boot JFS and ZFS) on priority order, it looks more interesting ZFS to me, since HPFS has MS patents on it and JFS is close source but AN is supporting it. ZFS can be focused on being an alternative for the future OS/2 file system.
But while there are people saying "don't reinvent the wheel" I say "reinvent the wheel if it is not open source". Close source software is future abandonware to me, even if it works fine today. (Already discussed on the past how open source software reduce the risk to be left "high and dry")
Gordon Letwin, according to wikipedia, is a guy that made millions with Microsoft, so I found it a little bit hard to contact him to request HPFS source code, his OS/2 book, or any other things related to OS/2 to be turn open source/public domain. He seems to be more focused on environmental activism. But I had never tried to contact him. Interesting historic post by Gordon Letwin, by the way.
If I can choose a priority outside the "File Systems" the priority should be to start cloning more deep components of OS/2 like the CPI API (possible more based on libc library) and a PM/GPI clone (also with more close dependencies to libc instead of CPI). It will require developers with a good understanding of the CPI API, PM API and LIBC. But since I don't do development and do not have money for an army of developers, this is only "sweet sweet drunk talk" for the moment.
Regards
RickCHodgin:
--- Quote from: Martin Iturbide on June 02, 2017, 06:50:11 pm ---Hi Rick.
My suggestions about file systems are the one that I posted. If I will have to put those (HPFS, Boot JFS and ZFS) on priority order, it looks more interesting ZFS to me, since HPFS has MS patents on it and JFS is close source but AN is supporting it. ZFS can be focused on being an alternative for the future OS/2 file system.
But while there are people saying "don't reinvent the wheel" I say "reinvent the wheel if it is not open source". Close source software is future abandonware to me, even if it works fine today. (Already discussed on the past how open source software reduce the risk to be left "high and dry")
Gordon Letwin, according to wikipedia, is a guy that made millions with Microsoft, so I found it a little bit hard to contact him to request HPFS source code, his OS/2 book, or any other things related to OS/2 to be turn open source/public domain. He seems to be more focused on environmental activism. But I had never tried to contact him. Interesting historic post by Gordon Letwin, by the way.
If I can choose a priority outside the "File Systems" the priority should be to start cloning more deep components of OS/2 like the CPI API (possible more based on libc library) and a PM/GPI clone (also with more close dependencies to libc instead of CPI). It will require developers with a good understanding of the CPI API, PM API and LIBC. But since I don't do development and do not have money for an army of developers, this is only "sweet sweet drunk talk" for the moment.
Regards
--- End quote ---
HPFS is very intriguing to me. I'm going to continue learning about it to see if it continue to pique my interest. It would be awesome to have an open source, well-debugged, high performance file system that could be ported to pretty much any OS with just a few tweaks.
I went through my old IDE hard drives last night looking for my PCI utility, but of the 10 drives I have, five were bad, three worked, and I have two left to test. I couldn't find the content on the three drives that work.
Nonetheless, after booting up in DOS on those three drives last night, I had the thought I would create a FAT16 partition and install DOS, and a second HPFS partition and install OS/2, and then have files on there and begin writing my driver to be able to read that second partition, and eventually read and write to it, and then have it working and updating files in a way that OS/2 then sees when I boot back into it.
I might be able to accomplish the same thing looking at virtual machine disk files, but I'm not sure of their data format. If they're linear, then it would be doable. We'll see.
Thank you,
Rick C. Hodgin
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