[Oberon] Flash drives

[easlab at absamail.co.za]

Douglas G. Danforth wrote:
> > Folks,
> > 
> > "Flash-based drives possible for Apple laptops" is a heading in a recent
> > article.
> > 
> > I was musing on what consequence this would have on "disk partitions"
> > since there are no cylinders for flash drives.  Which makes me ask, "how
> > dependent is the installation of Bluebottle on the partition concept?"
> > 
> > What are the consequences for multiple operating systems residing on the
> > same flash memory?
> > 
> > -Doug
> 
> Thomas wrote:
> The flash-based IDE drives work transparently with Bluebottle. With
> modern drives, the Cylinder Head Sector (CHS) addressing is only used
> for backward compatibility of the boot process.
> Once the system is running (and, if the BIOS allows it, already in the
> boot loader) blocknumbers are used for addressing. Bluebottle also works
> with CF (Compact Flash) cards or USB flash sticks. In both cases there
> are no physical cylinders, heads or sectors there. The partition table
> addresses the blocks of the device by specifying virtual cylinders heads
> and sectors that are then by the driver/bios converted to blocknumbers.
> 
> There are no new consequences for multiple operating systems. At least
> not with the flash-based Samsung drives that are currently discussed in
> the articles.
> http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/PressReleas\
> e.asp?seq 050523_0000123980
> 
> --Thomas

Making the right design decisions, so that when technology changes,
you haven't painted yourself into a corner.....?

I guess instead of translating CHS to LBA, it's just blocknumbers to LBA ?

Re. partitions: like any woman will tell you: "you can't have too many
cupboards".   The extra layer of clasification [via partitions] really
removed a serious weaknes of n-o's file system, in a neat way.

== Chris Glur.