Published device diver doesn't work

[haiqu]

Back in 2002 I wrote a Virtual Disk driver for development work. It set up a simple 64Mb BFS ramdisk that enabled faster compilation of projects.

On trying to port this code across, I find that it compiles and installs fine, and even publishes the driver properly. However, I cannot access it in any known way.

Following may show some useful stuff:

{{ ~> ls /dev/disk/virtual ram ~> mkfs -t bfs /dev/disk/virtual/ram Ram mkfs: Failed to get disk device for path /dev/disk/virtual/ram: No such file or directory }}

I also note that changing the name of /boot/system/bin/mkbfs to mkfs is rather annoying, especially since it can only do BFS anyhow.

[haiqu]

Damn. Once again:

~> ls /dev/disk/virtual
ram
~> mkfs -t bfs /dev/disk/virtual/ram Ram mkfs: Failed to get disk device for path /dev/disk/virtual/ram: No such file or directory

[stippi]

I can only comment on the mkbfs -> mkfs change. You are incorrect in that mkfs can only create BFS volumes. That's only the case because BFS is the only FS in Haiku which supports initializing partitions. It's _not_ a limitation of mkfs. That one has been written to support initializing any FS that supports initializing. Please don't assume we just change something for the sake of changing it without good reason.

[haiqu]

In BeOS there were only two, mkbfs and mkfat. So having a single file with options is less efficient than writing compatibility scripts, which would result in three files total. Installation packages rely on this name being available.

[axeld]

Haiku is not BeOS.

Since mkfs relies on the disk device manager functionality, you should name your device "raw", as that's what the disk device driver protocol demands now (partitions are then published automatically, too).

[haiqu]

Tried publishing to ram/raw but mkfs didn't format either ram or ram/raw and I couldn't see the driver from DriveSetup or the mount menu. Something definitely strange there, but since I've discovered the --use-gcc-pipe compilation option the need for it has diminished anyhow.

There are more interesting projects to chase.