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James Miller wrote:
>
> how about letting the user choose, somehow, what size 
> he/she'd like fs.img to be?  
> Would this sort of choice be feasible

No.  fs.img is a real ext2fs.  The size cannot be changed,
for the same reason you cannot expand or shrink a Linux
partition on HD after you have installed the filesystem.

> For example, the FAT16 filesystem is supposed to be not 
> very efficient at storing data.  

That criticism certainly applies to UMSDOS (plus some others
as well).  But BL3 has nothing to do with UMSDOS (the kernel
can't even mount a UMSDOS filesystem).

> So, perhaps HD space cannot be as efficiently used as if BL3 
> were using a native ext2 filesystem.  

It is using one!  Execute 'mount' from inside BL3 and you see 
that the root filesystem is ext2.

> Also, are there any performance hits in using this loop 
> device method on top of FAT16?  

None that I know of, but I am not an expert on this.  What
I can say is that it performs *much* better than UMSDOS.

> It's really an interesting idea to run a Linux system like 
> this, but it's sort of "out in left field" (never seen or
> heard of it before) 

There are still a couple of surprises in BL3 that nobody has
discovered yet.  Plenty of stuff to keep us talking.

BTW, BL3-02.zip is on the volny.cz site now.  
Major improvements to both pppd and rxvt.

Cheers,
Steven