ESIX and BSD filesystem

[Keith Ericson]

Has anyone else experimented with ESIX's BSD filesystem - for /usr or anwhere
else?  (I have a beta copy of Rev. D.; I assume it's up to production code.)

I lucked (?) into the availability of the BSD filesystem for ESIX when I was
having trouble installing onto an ESDI drive (Maxtor XT-4380E; Adaptec
2322B-8 controller).  In my many attempts to make the usr file system by
hand I used /etc/ffs/mkfs instead of /etc/ffs/newfs; during the file creation
process it informed me that it was creating a BSD file system with 255
character filenames - a good thing if you ask me.  In attempting to find out
more about this ability to create BSD filesystems I ran strings on /etc/mkfs
and discovered, I think, that one _should_ be able to specify the BSD file
system during the normal system installation if the "What kind of a file
system do you want: 1=normal 2=FFS" would accept "0" as a valid respones.
Instead, "0" is rejected as invalid during normal system installation.

Anyway, I got /usr created as a BSD file system.  (One thing I haven't found
out yet is just _where_ the description of the filesystem type lives - in
the boot block somewhere?)  Now I can create files names with names like
 "this_is_a_very_long_file_name" and they actually retain all the
characters.

HOWEVER (you saw this coming, right) not everything works like it used to.
The 'ls' command, by itself, spits out the directory contents.  But piping the
output of ls to anything (ls | cat) creates filenames truncated to 11
characters.  Use of wild cards is broken:

	$ touch file1
	$ touch file2
	$ touch file1a
	$ touch file1b
	$ ls file1*
	  file not found

Piping ls into cpio results in cpio having no filenames handed to it.

Weird? Weird.

Anyone know what's going on?  Should I go back to FFS?

(help *) KEITHE()