Hail the FreeBSD god AdmiralAK (or anyone else godly in UNIX!!)

[Nachohat]

Here is my problem: Mac OS X does not support floppy disks. But Mac OS X is just a shell that sits on top of Darwin UNIX right? Correct me if I'm wrong but Darwin is very similar to FreeBSD, and FreeBSD supports floppies!!! Damn

Therefore if I can mount floppies in FreeBSD I should be fine in Mac OS X terminal.

here's what I should type to access my floppy (please correct me because I'm probably wrong):

dmesg #this should let me view the boot message in
#which I can find the floppy info (fd0 I think)

mount /dev/fd0 /disk #this should mount the floppy in a
#directory called /disk

Is the file sytem in Darwin identical to FreeBSD? If not, where can I find an explanation of the Darwin file system?


Thanx

 

[Nachohat]

Well, I figured out how to find documentation on the Darwin file stystem. I had forgotten the very usefull command hier (yesterday in French, weird). Using the man pages is perfect.

man hier #to view info on the Darwin file system

 

[AdmiralAK]

a bit tired from brainbashing (studying).

Yes Darwin is a BSD, thus somehow does have floppy (and serial port) support. Apple either chose to either not implement it or just keep it low key in OS X I think. I dont have a floppy on my G3 so I couldnt really tell you...dont even have serial ports .

Its been so long since I have used BSD it aint even funny (damn homework!)

I am not sure if the f devices are all the same in all BSDs. I have only installed NetBSD under x86 in VPC a while back.... need to brush up.


am I rambling ?
going to bed... maybe I can find some help tomorrow and post back


Admiral

 

[scruffy]

The device drivers for video, ethernet, disks, and so on in OS X live in [/System]/Library/Extensions. They look a lot like .app dirs, except they're called .kext (kernel extension, I think).

If Darwin comes with a floppy driver, then maybe it could just be lifted off the Darwin install into OS X.

The other question is, when are the device files created, is it automatic at boot, can/should we interfere? The man page for mknod, the command to create device files, says the script /dev/MAKEDEV usually handles this, but there is no such script in evidence in OS X. In Linux, for what it's worth, /dev/MAKEDEV is a full program, not a script. Seems that with the Apple usual dislike for scattered config scripts and files, the making of device files would likely be put somewhere else.

I wonder - since most gadgets are automatically recognized, perhaps just putting a floppy kext where it would be found by any booting OS's would be enought to automagically create the right device files... This will bear investigating, once finals are over.