Paul proposed implementing a syscall as a first exercise. I am digging a little myself and found that most online documents (including the textbook) are not up-to-date with 2.6.16. So I am trying to document a little bit of my own.

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I took the job of developing project ideas for cs411, which is basically a Linux kernal hacking class. Currently what I have come up with is a tar file system. The implementation would take a tar file and make a file system out of it. I am currently thinking about have three steps toward the final program.

In step 1, we would get familiar with VHS interfaces and data structures. It’s probably a good idea to implement a very simple filesystem, say, containing only one file and its name and content are hard coded.

In step 2, we would try to hack a little on tar file format (which should be pretty straight-forward) and make a read-only tar filesystem.

In the final step, we would try to make it writeable as well. This might be too complicated since tar is intended to be linearly accessed rather than randomly accessed.