using the openmoko neo101 in mass storage mode

Lorn Potter lpotter at trolltech.com
Fri May 30 21:26:41 CEST 2008


Andy Green wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> | On Fri, May 30, 2008 10:09 am, Andy Green wrote:
> |
> |> ~ But not mass storage: this operates in block mode and requires 
> complete
> |> ownership of the storage by the host then (since if we have it mounted
> |> too, we will write conflicting things to directory structures, etc).
> |
> | Could we emulate a block device, so that Windows thinks it has sole
> | ownership of a USB block device with a FAT32 FS on it, but for every 
> block
> | access call it makes we intercept the call, figure out what file windows
> | is trying to read or write to, make the corresponding change to our local
> | files (on and ext3 volume), and return emulated results back to windows.
> |
> | I dare say windows would get confused if I file it had cached got changed
> | by Linux, but the user could probably put up with that.
> 
> This was proposed before, but it sounds horrible to me.  Linux knows
> already how to deal with sharing a mounted filesystem over the network,
> better to go on leveraging stuff at that layer.

I think most phones that are capable of doing usb network/storage do 
this, as well as the Nokia tablet devices.

It is not that difficult to make the software safely umount the 
sd/cf/whatever on the device, rmmod/insmod the drivers and make it 
available as a usb storage device to the host pc. Qtopia 4.4 will have 
this feature built in and software to allow the user to change it.

To the user, its much easier than having to set up samba networking, and 
most windows users do not have ssh, and developers can set up access 
however they want it.


> I don't much like Samba either but we could run a stripped down copy of
> that or lighttpd on our end of the Ethernet-over-USB connection and
> provide a solid filesystem access solution without any special projects.
> ~ We already have perl and sshd so KDE's fish:// works fine, just not
> everybody runs KDE :-)
> 
> http://linuxreviews.org/kde/kde-user-persp/fish.html


-- 
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech




More information about the community mailing list