Comtrol eCos - Manual (Page 415)

Chapter 19. Introduction
This document describes the filesystem infrastructure provided in eCos. This is implemented by the FILEIO pack-
age and provides POSIX compliant file and IO operations together with the BSD socket API. These APIs are
described in the relevant standards and original documentation and will not be described here. See
Chapter 31 for
details of which parts of the POSIX standard are supported.
This document is concerned with the interfaces presented to client filesystems and network protocol stacks.
The FILEIO infrastructure consist mainly of a set of tables containing pointers to the primary interface functions of
a file system. This approach avoids problems of namespace pollution (for example several filesystems can have a
function called
read() , so long as they are static). The system is also structured to eliminate the need for dynamic
memory allocation.
New filesystems can be written directly to the interfaces described here. Existing filesystems can be ported very
easily by the introduction of a thin veneer porting layer that translates FILEIO calls into native filesystem calls.
The term filesystem should be read fairly loosely in this document. Object accessed through these interfaces could
equally be network protocol sockets, device drivers, fifos, message queues or any other object that can present a
file-like interface.
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