# How hard to add ext2 volume support?



## TIVO2IMAC (May 2, 2002)

Any suggestions on where to start to attempting writing a little add-in to OSX so that a Linux hard disk volume will be recoginized by the Mac's operating system as a mountable volume?

How difficult do you figure this task might be to accomplish?

What good references are their for writing drivers for Darwin?


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## lethe (May 3, 2002)

filesystem support in UNIX boxes is in the kernel.  in microkernel systems, IT IS NOT!!!

OSX uses a microkernel.  filesystem drivers are not in the kernel!  this means that designing a file system driver would be considerably different that in linux of freebsd (which use monolithic kernels), and in theory, a lot easier, more secure and more portable.

here is a good place to start reading on low level programming for OSX.  be advised that you have to have extensive programming experience to undertake such a task.  i m cheering for you.

but... i also vote for XFS instead of ext2


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## lethe (May 3, 2002)

also, here is a great place to talk to people about darwin programming.  this is a mailing list.  if you do a search for ext2 on this mailing list, you will see that there are already a number of people interested in this project.  there are a lot of advices on how to get started on this project.

since darwin is an open source project, i would not be surprised to see some linux/ppc zealot complete such a port.  perhaps it will be TIVO


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## lethe (May 3, 2002)

when i said linux/ppc i was not referring to the company that releases the LinuxPPC distro, i was referring to the general community of the linux ppc port.  i think that the ppc port of the linux kernel is officially known as linux/ppc.

when i said tivo, i wasn t referring to the TiVo company, i was referring to TIVO2IMAC, the person who started this thread, and apparently has some interest in this project.


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## marks (May 5, 2002)

You might be able find some information from the open/net/free BSD source trees in their implementation of reading/writing to ext2fs.


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## lethe (May 12, 2002)

At this point i assume that TIVO has no interest in this matter, but i came across apples beginner kernel extension programmers manual, so i will post the link for any in the future who might be interested that come across this thread:

http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/documentation/howto/html/KEXT_Tutorials/HelloKEXT.html


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