Proposal: BBFS

[MadMockers]

See: MadMockers/BareBonesOS#7

[MadMockers]

I'm open to the bootloader understanding some sort of file system, however there's a cost in terms of size for each file system we want to support. Due to this, I think we should iron out any issues with the chosen file system.
I suggest we modify the proposal to include the real size of the file. Expecting end users of the file system to implement their own sizing is I believe too onerous, but also simple for us to fix before it's an issue.

[interfect]

Here's a full implementation of the filesystem I proposed, with a bootloader that reads it.

https://github.com/interfect/bbfs

As the bootloader takes up more or less a whole sector with the filesystem library routines it needs, I don't think it makes sense to make bootloaders understand more than one filesystem type. We can just have the normal bootloader that doesn't read files (but which can already be instructed to load any contiguous run of sectors) and bootloaders for each filesystem that people bother to implement.

I think file sizing could be done fairly simply. Since the FAT is currently only holding sector numbers (11 bits max), we can use just the high bit to indicate when a sector is the last, and the rest of the bits for the last sector can store the number of words in the sector. I'll mock that up when I get a chance.

[interfect]

OK, I now track file sizes to the nearest word. They still need some better tests to see if they are correctly respected when reading, but they're definitely making it onto the disk when writing.