I would like to write some basic disk scanner utility. Basically I would like to be able to read raw bytes of a certain file(s) as written to the disk in the way system's disk utilities (like error checking and defragmentation in windows) do it. I would like to do it in C.
What should be my first steps? Obviously fopen is not enough.
Any guidance would be much appreciated (I don't ask for a solution, just a bit of theory and push in a right direction as I don't even know where to start from...).
The following resources might be of use:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/100027
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/rawsectorio.aspx
You are venturing into the land of the driver here. Most of the file access APIs still hold you at a level higher than the disk itself. You could be talking to a file system on a CD, a RAMDisk, a SAN or HDD and you shouldn't care.
If you need to hit the disk directly then the Volume Managment API should help you out on Windows:
Volume Management API
fopen and fread will work. If you want to use an unbuffered interface, use open and read instead. Open and read are part of the POSIX standard, so they work in Windows too, although you may want to find manual pages for windows to be sure to catch any subtle differences in behaviour.
Related
I want to get information about the battery in C on linux. I don't want to read or parse any file! Is there any low-level interface to acpi/the kernel or any other module to get the information I want to have?
I already searched the web, but every question results in the answer "parse /proc/foo/bar". I really don't want to do this because I think, low-level interfaces won't change as fast as Files do.
best regards.
The /proc filesystem does not exist on a disk. Instead, the kernel creates it in memory. They are generated on-demand by the kernel when accessed. As such, your concerns are invalid -- the /proc files will change as quickly as the kernel becomes aware of changes.
Check this for more info about /proc file system.
In any case, I don't believe there's any alternative interface.
You might be looking for UPower: http://upower.freedesktop.org/
This is a common need for both desktop environments and mobile devices, so there have been many solutions over time. For example, one of the oldest ones was acpid, which is pretty much obsolete now.
While I'd recommend using a light-weight abstraction like UPower for code clarity reasons, the files in /proc and (to some extent) /sys are considered part of the Linux kernel ABI, which means that changing them is generally frowned upon.
I'm taking Computer Organization class this semester.
My professor give us a homework.the description is as follows:
Write a program to benchmark the two file systems, Windows and Linux. Discuss which performs better.
I want to use C to implement this homework assignment, but I have no idea how to start.
What functions do I need? What I can do?
Please give me some hints or example.
You could download the sources from bonie++ and look how they to this.
But i think the best way is that you write to your HDD and look how long it takes to write or read the defined data.
Some interesting data points just for file reads/writes:
cold cache vs hot cache,
single-thread? concurrent threads?
posix aio vs windows overlapped i/o (single thread? multiple threads?)
You might also measure speed of directory enumeration and traversal.
Keep in mind that both Linux and Windows support many filesystems; ext4 and NTFS are the most widely used for Linux and Windows respectively.
What functions should you use? For unix, there's the basic read(2) and write(2) calls (for normal, blocking IO). Windows has ReadFile and WriteFile.
Can anybody point me to a simple (can't stress this enough) implementation of an in memory file system? If I can create a file and do a simple cat file.txt it's more than enough.
I would like to use it as part of my toy OS.
The OSDev wiki site might help you. You can also ask your questions there and if you look at wiki and their forum you will pretty likely get your answer.
In my opinion, in-memory file systems should be as basic as possible. Here is a virtual file system implemented in user-mode from Windows, but its design principals can be used in your own OS. http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Programming_a_Virtual_File_System-Part_I.shtml . Even this might be too much for your basic OS. I say just wing it and create a linked list of file descriptors that include only file attributes, file name, and file path with each file.
This belongs on Super User IMHO, but anyway, you might want to look at ImDisk. It should be more than enough for just creating a RAM disk.
Wait, I misread... this is for your "toy OS"? Your toy OS supports file systems? You're going to have to implement it yourself, since there's no way something preexisting will work with your home-made OS.
I am wondering how the OS is reading/writing to the hard drive.
I would like as an exercise to implement a simple filesystem with no directories that can read and write files.
Where do I start?
Will C/C++ do the trick or do I have to go with a more low level approach?
Is it too much for one person to handle?
Take a look at FUSE: http://fuse.sourceforge.net/
This will allow you to write a filesystem without having to actually write a device driver. From there, I'd start with a single file. Basically create a file that's (for example) 100MB in length, then write your routines to read and write from that file.
Once you're happy with the results, then you can look into writing a device driver, and making your driver run against a physical disk.
The nice thing is you can use almost any language with FUSE, not just C/C++.
I found it quite easy to understand a simple filesystem while using the fat filesystem on the avr microcontroller.
http://elm-chan.org/fsw/ff/00index_e.html
Take look at the code you will figure out how fat works.
For learning the ideas of a file system it's not really necessary to use a disk i think. Just create an array of 512 byte byte-arrays. Just imagine this a your Harddisk an start to experiment a bit.
Also you may want to hava a look at some of the standard OS textbooks like http://codex.cs.yale.edu/avi/os-book/OS8/os8c/index.html
The answer to your first question, is that besides Fuse as someone else told you, you can also use Dokan that does the same for Windows, and from there is just a question of doing Reads and Writes to a physical partition (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363858%28v=vs.85%29.aspx (read particularly the section on Physical Disks and Volumes)).
Of course that in Linux or Unix besides using something like Fuse you only have to issue, a read or write call to the wanted device in /dev/xxx (if you are root), and in these terms the Unices are more friendly or more insecure depending on your point of view.
From there try to implement a simple filesystem like Fat, or something more exoteric like an tar filesystem, or even some simple filesystem based on Unix concepts like UFS or Minux, or just something that only logs the calls that are made and their arguments to a log file (and this will help you understand, the calls that are made to the filesystem driver during the regular use of your computer).
Now your second question (that is much more simple to answer), yes C/C++ will do the trick, since they are the lingua franca of system development, also a lot of your example code will be in C/C++ so you will at least read C/C++ in your development.
Now for your third question, yes, this is doable by one person, for example the ext filesystem (widely known in Linux world by it's successors as ext2 or ext3) was made by a single developer Theodore Ts'o, so don't think that these things aren't doable by a single person.
Now the final notes, remember that a real filesystem interacts with a lot of other subsystems in a regular kernel, for example, if you have a laptop and hibernate it the filesystem has to flush all changes made to the open files, if you have a pagefile on the partition or even if the pagefile has it's own filesystem, that will affect your filesystem, particularly the block sizes, since they will tend to be equal or powers of the page block size, because it's easy to just place a block from the filesystem on memory that by coincidence is equal to the page size (because that's just one transfer).
And also, security, since you will want to control the users and what files they read/write and that usually means that before opening a file, you will have to know what user is logged on, and what permissions he has for that file. And obviously without filesystem, users can't run any program or interact with the machine. Modern filesystem layers, also interact with the network subsystem due to the fact that there are network and distributed filesystems.
So if you want to go and learn about doing kernel filesystems, those are some of the things you will have to worry about (besides knowing a VFS interface)
P.S.: If you want to make Unix permissions work on Windows, you can use something like what MS uses for NFS on the server versions of windows (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262965)
I have a FAT12 image file and I have to open it and read it. I would like to view this image file(directories/files with in) so I can have an idea of what outcomes I should be getting. Anyone know of a good software that would let me view this FAT12 image file? Also can someone guide towards the right directions when trying to read the content of this image file?
There are a number of open source FAT filesystem implementations around.
One which I think has nice clear portable code, though there are bugs, particularly in FAT12 implementation, is http://www.larwe.com/zws/products/dosfs/index.html.
On Linux you can just mount it using the loopback device.
There is Segger files system called emFile. It is portable fs, i have emFile working on number of embedded operating system with minimal (almost none, a few simple function that need to be implemented for each os) development effort. It's not expensive as well,i mean if you doing something for fun you probably don't want to spend money at all , but for commercial use it's cheap.
http://hachoir.org/wiki/hachoir-parser
HTH