It turns out that trying to create your own filesystem is a bit more difficult than one might expect. I have been nose-deep in various documentation about filesystem theory and the layouts of various popular filesystems for a little over a week. (Okay, okay, so most of it begins with “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...", but still–lots of good information out there.)
Things I have learned, after the break.
There were a few things in the last post that I indicated I still wanted to get done before calling the MBR “done” and actually moving on to the VBR.
The last time we talked, I mentioned the next few steps that needed to be done in order to get to the stage two.
So, this post is a day or two late, but I haven’t had time to work on it since then so this is still current information: I got something to boot!
A much as I want to just jump in and start writing a bootloader, I know that I need to at least make a cursory attempt at some design decisions first. After reading a thread on OS design archived by the site osdever.net, it seems that I have more decisions to make than I first realized. Well, that’s what this project is about (learning, that is), so let’s make a list of some design decisions that will need to be addressed (I’ll update the post when I make a decision on some of these).