Subj : Re: Computer Broken
To   : tenser
From : apam
Date : Sun Sep 14 2025 08:58 pm

 > Oh nice.  What's the problem that you hit?  Possibly you've already
 > fixed it by now, but I'm curious.

It was actually an issue with my memcmp function, i was comparing an
extra byte.. no idea how that one snuck by for so long!

It's all working now :D

 > It strikes me that you could probably still use limine regardless
 > of whether the OS used a different file system format: you'd just
 > prepare an image with a copy of the kernel in a small FAT
 > partition, but the system would mostly ignore it once running.

Yes, I did try that first, but it didn't work - I assumed I had an error
loading from the second partition, but I didn't dig in and went the fat
route instead, I should try again! Part of the reason was Limine passes
the frame buffer info a bit differently to grub (not incorrectly, just a
way I hadn't realized could be done, so thats fixed now too)

 > I presume to prepare an image, you attach a file to a pseudo disk
 > device via a loopback driver and initialize and mount a Minix FS
 > on it, then just copy files to that.  You could, however, create

Yep! that's exactly what I am doing

 > a filesystem directly in a disk file and copy files into that; it
 > would be a fair bit of work, as you'd have to write code to write
 > the minix3 file structures into that file, versus letting the kernel
 > do that for you, but it would be very portable.  Of course, using
 > FAT would be much simpler.

Yeah, it's possible, but yeah, a lot of work, and filesystems are
something I struggle with a bit. I did think instead I could write a
minix3 FUSE driver, then it might port to use with FUSE on other systems.

Fat is also much better, my minix 3 driver only supports 1024 block size,
which appears to make filesystems restricted to small sizes. I'm not sure
if thats an error on my part, as when I was writing it I understood that
they could only be 1024 block size, but I think that was incorrect.

Now that the FAT driver is working, I've been able to port all my scripts
to use FreeBSD, which is great, means I'm not stuck on Linux if I don't
want to be :)

Andrew


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