Clarification of Question by
quacky-ga
on
27 May 2003 07:28 PDT
Hi Skermit,
Without giving too much detail about the exact use of this device (for
obvious reasons :)), i can say that the speed of the IDE/ATA BUS is
sufficient.
That does sound interesting RE the slashdot.org articles, it could
point us in the right direction of how we would go about this.
But keep in mind that this is not a storage device.
the files on the 'emulated filesystem' would serve dynamic real-time
data.
(of course some form of buffer would be necesary to ensure no data
corruption, as i believe, correct me if im wrong, the data from a
disk, even an emulated one, comes off in chunks - so a whole file
would not be retrieved at once)
In the end, we want our device to act as a data 'stream', where
opening and reading from a file would never actually end.
Once the file is opened in a program, and a read loop initiated, the
EOF would never actually happen, giving a driverless interface to a
fast data stream.
this is our goal.
Apart from speed, the IDE/ATA interface would allow this to be
completely cross-platform without drivers and support issues. As
reading from files is one of the most basic thing any O/S can do.
(and an emulated dos fat16 partition format would be the most
compatible across all platforms presumably)
Sorry for the lack of specifics, but this is only a new idea, and we
are still 'working out the details'.
For examples sake, lets assume we are making an IDE temperature
sensor.
Where once installed, the bios would detect this device as a "XXXmb
Temperature.drive".
Under dos/windows/linux, it would assume the next available drive
letter.
(or in Linux' case, be mounted as /whatever)
Opening the file <drive_letter>:\temp.in would then return the current
temperature.
Something to accomplish this would serve as our base.
I hope this clears it up and narrows the field a little.
This is a difficult question. :)
