Subject: Re: kernel oops when writing to hfs filesystem, + varous other problems
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Mar 01 2002 - 14:05:41 MST
At 6:30 PM +1100 3/1/02, Ben Stanley wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I installed YellowDog Linux 2.1 on a G3 PowerBook (yr 2000 model), and I
>set up a large (13 Gb) shared data partition formatted as hfs. However,
>often when I tried to read or write to it from Linux, I found that it I
>got dropped into xmon... yuck.
The Linux HFS filesystem is very buggy, and has been so for a long
time. It's not been maintained well as the Linux VFS (filesystem
infrastructure) evolved around it. Don't use it unless you like to
crash.
If you need to copy files to and from a HFS partition, use the
hfsutils package (hmount, hcopy, etc.). It's included with YDL and
the programs can be used to copy to and from HFS without really
mounting the HFS file system (works just like dosutils if you're
familiar with that).
>The crashes occurred when using kde to perform the copying or deleting,
>and also when using command line.
The problem is in the kernel so it will happen anywhere.
>My primary work with this machine is in MacOS 9, so I have (for now)
>re-formatted the drive and installed MacOS 9 on it. (I had other issues
>with MacOnLinux, which I had been planning to use. I was unable to mount
>a drive as writeable and actually write to it.)
By any chance, did you have the partition you were trying to use for
MOL mounted by Linux? You must give MOL exclusive access to the
partition.
>So the problems I had with the YDL 2.1 + MOL 0.9.60-4 solution were:
>* Couldn't use right mouse button (seems I have to set a kernel argument
>to fix this)
What right mouse button? Your PowerBook certainly doesn't have one. :)
If you're using an external USB mouse with a second button it should
"just work" in most cases.
If you're not, the kernel argument stuff has to do with setting up a
key on the keyboard to use as a substitute for the right mouse button.
>* MOL couldn't write to the hfs partitions (despite setting -rw in
>molrc)
>* Linux was unreliable while reading/writing to the hfs partitions
>* Couldn't mount a CDRom in MacOS from within MOL
It's been a while since I used MOL but I think you have to have the
CD in the drive before starting MOL. MOL merely exposes the
/dev/cdrom block device to MacOS and has no way of communicating
media change events, etc.
>Did I just not try hard enough, or is this the state of the art?
>
>I'm a fairly seasoned Linux user; been doing a lot of hacking with Linux
>on an intel box and I have YellowDog 2.0 installed on a 6100 using the
>nubus-pmac kernel. However, this machine is for working, not playing
>around. I need to get things done on it, and I may be crashing MacOS a
>lot - I was attracted to Linux by the quick restart feature of mol, and
>the fact that having Linux operate the filesystem should prevent it from
>being corrupted if MacOS locks up inside mol.
FYI, Linux will do no such thing, because it isn't operating the Mac
filesystem. The MacOS running inside MOL has raw block level access
to the partition, and can do just as much damage if it crashes as it
would running by itself.
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Fri Mar 01 2002 - 14:21:00 MST