How hard to add ext2 volume support?

T

TIVO2IMAC

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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?
 
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
 
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
 
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.
 
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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