[TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed Feb 22 07:49:13 AEST 2017


    > From: Larry McVoy

    > The DOS file system, while stupid, was very robust in the face of
    > crashes

I'm not sure it's so much the file system (in the sense of the on-disk
format), as how the system _used_ it (although I suppose one could consider
that part of the FS too).

The duplicated FAT, and the way file sectors are linked using it, is I suppose
a little more robust than other designs (e.g. the way early Unixes did it,
with indirect blocks and free lists), but I think a lot of it must have been
that DOS wrote stuff out quickly (as opposed to e.g. the delayed writes on
early Unix FS's, etc). That probably appoximated the write-ordering of more
designed-robust FS's.

	Noel



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