[TUHS] VFS prior to 1984

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Wed Jun 24 08:24:30 AEST 2020


On Tue, 23 Jun 2020, Norman Wilson wrote:

> The only file-system switch I know well is that in the later Research 
> systems.  It has nothing to do with disks or blocks. It is about names 
> and inodes: turn name to struct inode, read arbitrary chunk of data, 
> write arbitrary chunk of data, create file, unlink file, abominable 
> ill-defined system call that just wouldn't die erm I mean ioctl, and so 
> on.

Ioctl: the Swiss Army knife of system calls.  I thought it was a neat idea 
when it arrived (much better then those primitive stty/gtty calls) but 
now...

-- Dave


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