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Re: Writing some network driver?

On Wednesday, February 20, 2002, at 10:21 AM, Christian Schmitz wrote:

Hi,

since Mac OS X 10.1 there is a Samba Client in Mac OS X so you can mount
a Windows FileSharing volume on your desktop.

Now I'd like to write something like this for some other network
protocolls. But I'm looking for the right start point. I've seen a lot
of documentation about implementing network drivers which control
Ethernet cards or define new protocols like TCP/IP.

But I'd prefer to write some driver to be put between the Finder and
TCP/IP so I can redirect all file related calls through the network to a
server.

This isn't the right list, because what you want to do is way beyond what a driver should be doing. Try the 'darwin-development' list.

Since you want to support a file system, a driver is the wrong mechanism to use. In particular, it will never see any file system calls, and it is architecturally at the wrong place.

In fact, you need to develop a file system plugin (using the VFS mode - Virtual File System) and supporting commands (fsck, mount, ...). The reason for this is that you need to obey a lot of rules that deal with how data is cached within the system, and how files are handled by the system. Rather than reinvent all of that support, you are better off implementing this as a file system, to take advantage of what the system does for you, and to hook into the system at the proper layer.

To see examples of these plugins, check the Filesystems folder:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/cgi-bin/registered/cvs/Filesystems
or do
cvs co -c | grep Filesystems
to see the possible projects that can be checked out.

Regards,

Justin

--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large *
Institute for General Semantics | When LuteFisk is outlawed
| Only outlaws will have
| LuteFisk
*--------------------------------------*-------------------------------*
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 >Writing some network driver? (From: email@hidden (Christian Schmitz))



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