On 7/20/20 10:15 PM, tytso@mit.edu wrote:
> Sorry for not responding on this thread earlier; I've been pretty 
> swamped lately.

Better late than never.

I've found that truly interesting threads on TUHS, COFF, cctalk, et al. 
tend to go on for weeks.

> Xiafs was introduced at about the same time of ext2; Wikipedia 
> states that
> 
>     "Initially, Xiafs was more stable than ext2, but being a fairly
>     minimalistic modification of the MINIX file system, it was not very
>     well suited for future extension."
> 
> The first part wasn't quite accurate.  It turns out that xiafs had 
> the same bug as ext2, but ext2 had the necessary sanity checking so 
> that it actually issued a warning when the bug was triggered, where 
> xiafs just silently corrupted the file system.

Now I'm curious what said bug was.

> The real issue was that xiafs was mostly a one-person show (namely 
> Frank Xia) and he suffered blowback when he tried to rename xiafs 
> to linuxfs, which was interpreted by many as a marketing effort --- 
> about as tone-deaf as Stallman trying to jawbone people to rename 
> "Linux" to "LiGNUx" ten years later.

Hum.  :-/

To be perfectly honest, I hadn't heard of Xia-FS until I started messing 
with H.J. Lu's bootable root disk.  I started messing with Linux in late 
'90s.  By then, everything was ext2.

> And xiafs was technically worse compared to ext2, and ext2 had a larger 
> number of developers.  So xiafs never really stood much of a chance.

That makes sense, retrospectively.

> Also, by that point, very few people were actually using HJ's boot/root 
> disks.  Most developers had moved on to the MCC distribution by that 
> time, since it was more comprehensive, and it was easier to bootstrap 
> a working development system.

Ya.  It seems as if H.J. Lu's disk had largely fallen to the annals of 
history by '95.  MCC and SLS had come and gone, being replaced with 
Slackware and Debian by the time that I started messing with Linux.

> So to be honest, I had never noticed that HJ was trying to use xiafs 
> in his boot/root disks.

I can't guarantee that H.J. Lu used xiafs for his bootable root disk.  I 
want to say that he was using the minux file system.  It's the base disk 
images that seem to be using xiafs.

I've found a treasure trove of old Linux disk images on OldLinux [1] and 
am messing with them in Bochs.  (Bochs is working out better than 
VirtualBox.)

[1] http://www.oldlinux.org/



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die