File Manager

[Norman Feske]

Hello Ben,

> What level of file management does Genode have? Is there a graphical
> file manager available? Does noux support file management?

there exists no graphical file manager for Genode. You can use coreutils
in a noux instance to operate on files, though.

When attempting to port existing GUI applications, please keep in mind
that Genode does not support GTK. So you may be better off with
Qt5-based software. If you are genuinely interested in porting software
to Genode, you may find our porting guide useful:

  http://genode.org/documentation/developer-resources/porting

> Also, since I am considering implementing a file manager if one doesn't
> already exist, how would I do it? I'm thinking of porting PCManFM to
> Genode, so how does the filesystem work? (Does it have a single root
> directory like Linux, or does it just give you access to each filesystem
> like in Windows?)

Genode does not have global file system. Each process has a separate
instance of a virtual file system (VFS) that encompasses only those
files that the process needs to see. Such a process-local VFS is
configured by the respective parent process. To learn more about this
approach, let me point you to the following documentation snippet:


http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/14.05#Per-process_virtual_file_systems

To actually access files on a disk, you will need to start an instance
of a file-system server (e.g., rump_fs) and a disk driver. The
file-system server will have a "Block" session to the disk driver and,
in turn, provide a "File_system" service. This service can then be used
by a program that has a '<fs>' node configured in its VFS.

Cheers
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org

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