Instead of choosing filesystems for each partition, simply create the partition (using c/fdisk) that will be used for Dragonfly, leaving the rest of the disk space blank. You really don't want to give more space to Dragonfly than what's needed. Hopefully, Dragonfly doesn't misbehave and demand to use the entire disk. That' why I invited Tallship here. Because he can answer these questions in a more authoritative manner. Let's wait a bit and see if he shows up on his own. If not, I would suggest that some of you also email him, asking him to participate here.

And personally, I prefer XFS as my filesystem. Personal experience has shown it to be exceptional and stable. Recovery has never been an issue for me either.

Shingoshi

Okay I'll look forward to tallship's arrival. I'm going to peruse the dragonfly handbook until then, and maybe even get started on the deployment tonight. The only question I have for the moment is how do I go about making the USB stick from the .img file? ...rather, what are the proper parameters for the dd command? What bs is appropriate? I'm going to try the standard 512 and see what happens, and I'll report that as soon as I know.

The only time I ever used my usbstick, was to transfer a file. I left the formatting as it was. So I couldn't help you there. I too am waiting for Tallship to show up. There might be threads here on LQ which would answer you question about the usbstick.

Shingoshi

I am SOOO lost . . .

Wouldn't the whole challenge here be writing a Linux driver for the HAMMERFS? Once that was done, wouldn't running Slackware, or ANY Linux distro with HAMMERFS be just like etx3, JFS, or XFS?

Dragonfly is open source, right? So . . . you could just port the HAMMERFS drivers from their kernel, right? (You'd have to re-write them, but the low-level code could at least be made to match.)

Yeah see I've been sort of thinking the same thing... I just figured we'd go with shingoshi's plan since it was the only one we had at the moment. Thing is, I'm no FS guru, so porting might prove to be difficult. I might try that route as well tho.

[EDIT]Plus, we also have to consider all of the other utilities that go with a FS, like formatting utilities and tuners and consistency checks and all that jazz (all though some functionality already might be covered by the kernel at a generic level, waiting to be implemented on a per FS basis...). There's a lot of work going to be have to be done here, and I for one am sure I'm going to have trouble because I'm new enough to Linux, let alone BSD/unix. I'm more than ready to dive in head first though!![/EDIT]

But I really have no way of knowing until the attempt has been made. I'm hoping that simply compiling the HammerFS driver on Dragonfly and repackaging it will start us off in the right direction. We really need Tallship to show up here. I don't have the means to try any of this. And that's bad. I really should have something to work with here. But I don't, and can't change that. So the best I can do is speculate from a position of ignorance. Which is something I really hate doing.

Maybe I'm going about this all wrong. We need to have a running Linux kernel to compile the Hammer drivers against. So my suggestion may be backwards! I have to get the Hammer sources and see if I can compile them on Slackware. That may be the correct way of doing this. I don't know though, and that bothers me.

I'll look for the Hammer sources now.

Shingoshi

EDIT: We should all start looking to see what else has been done or speculated by other Linux groups to see what they've come up with. Searching Google for hammerfs is the place to start.
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=93681

EDIT: I just found this link on Google: http://hammerfs.googlepages.com/
Seems someone has already started working on this.
http://hammerfs-ftw.blogspot.com/200...-to-linux.html

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarc.../msg00062.html
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarc.../msg00063.html
Matt Dillon's email address: dillon @ backplane.com

I'll keep adding to this list. So check back and see what I've updated here.
Shingoshi

EDIT: I wouldn't be surprised if I saw comments like these coming from users on this forum also: http://linsux.org/index.php?topic=410.0
Pretty pathetic!

have you emailed matt dillon? i'm going to, and mention that we've considered contributing to a port of his FS. I'm sure he'd be the one to know about links and peeps and all that good info. I'll keep you posted on our convo.

Yes, you have to port the code to Linux otherwise it wont work.

There's already a project on the way to port the Hammer FS to Linux by Daniel Lorch.
Here are some more details http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarc.../msg00000.html

Hey
did you guys read about this stuff

damn...

Okay there's a few things that I should probably cover here. Hammer is Alpha right now for Linux. I've been running it for a couple of months, and you can create images and mount them, and read them, and that's about it right now.

I've provided a doc w/links to compile and mount the fs on your systems - any GNU/Linux system will do for this. There's nothing particularly distro specific at this point, although Slackhammer is intended for us Slacksters, and I suppose support for this arch is actually distro-centric.

Once we've finished I'm sure there will be all kinds of folks wanting to mount Hammer filesystems on Linux machines. But now is prolly the best time to begin familiarizing ourselves with it.

http://NorthTech.US/slackhammer/README

Matthew is quite supportive of the effort too, and I expect may even provide some final tweaking and testing before a stable Linux port is finally released.

On another note (as there are just too many posts to quote from above), I'll address a few issues I've seen in this thread so far.

First, a 40GByte partition is okay once the filesystem is writable, but in general, 60 gigs (even more) is probably the minimum before the filesystem is even worth mounting. But use the image that's available on the site - no need to start creating partitions at this point. Just mount it under /mnt or wherever you prefer in your /etc/fstab.

As far as device drivers are concerned, insmod will take care of that. There's more elegant ways to do this on startup later so you don't have to put it into rc.local too, but for now that's not advisable since we're just talking about installing the kernel mod and tearing it out again and again.

I'm not sure if it was this thread or the previous one, but someone had said something about files systems, crashes, and recovery where mounting a file system from a live CD is concerned. It's hogwash, if you use a live CD that has that FS on it However, it is always a valid concern nevertheless, and a 10 or 20 meg /boot partition (make it Ext2) will ensure that you don't have to work around this issue if you're worried about Linux doin' a wyndoze on you LOL!

This reeks of deja vu to me so much Linboard Linux started out on FIDOnet this way, when I was complaining about the broken releases of 386BSD and SLS Linux at that time. There really wasn't anything else but Linboard and Yggdrassil. I had Linboard selling on the shelves at Egghead Software and Computerland, among others, and one day I noticed that some deadhead dude wearing tie-dyes up in the Bay Area had also rolled a distro for the same frustrated reasons I did - but Patrick did it waaaayyy better, and I've been a Slackware zealot ever since

Well, that's about it for now. I've got my 30th High School reunion tonight in Redondo Beach, my elementary school reunion at a pizza parlor on Sunday afternoon in Torrance, and maybe I'll get lucky with one of my old high school sweethearts eh?

Kindest regards,

All I have to say is that this is going to be SCHWEEEEEEET

Hot DAMN!!
The last time I chatted with Matthew, I may have gotten the wrong opinion of his attitude about porting this filesystem. But if he is now willing to participate with a formal effort to get HammerFS on Linux, I can't think of anything better.

Hallelujah!!

Shingoshi

Okay, update time. Just got through tallship's little readme and I've achieved read only functionality from the kernel module. the hammerread package wouldn't compile on my system, and I've been perusing the code to figure out the error message fro the time being. However, like I said I can mount the raw disk image using

There is one file on there called hammer time, and it's someone's wonderful ASCII art of MC Hammer doing the hammertime dance. Pretty funny if you ask me :-p. Tried to write it and vim allowed me to, until it tried to write to the FS which is what I expected as well. So now we have to get in touch with this Daniel guy and help him figure out the write port! That and we need to do a lot more testing of block devices and other serious FS use to work out the bugs of the read module.

Have any of you other guys started playing with this? It's pretty cool :-p

I was really concerned that I wouldn't have the disk space for this. Which is funny now. Because my root filesystem is a 1 TB RAID1. Nice to know now that it's possible to use and work on smaller installations. Now, I'll definitely have to rethink that.

Shingoshi