Final Year Project: Using Linux Filesystems Under Windows   Chris Bryden BEng. Electronics and Software Engineering    School of Computer Science   University of Birmingham 57 Exceptions ‘or ‘Divide by Zero’ errors, which do not lock the machine, but merely result in the application being terminated. It should be noted though, that these faults only occur if the filesystem contains errors. On a clean filesystem very few errors occur.   The copy file function returns an average transfer speed when copying a file   and   this   can   be   used   for   measuring   file   transfer   performance.   The performance of the cd and ls commands is not measured in this way, but a feel for their performance is quickly gained by navigating the filesystem a little. The overall  performance  of  the  library  is  good,  the  ls  command  produces  directory listings   more   or   less   instantly   and   the   cp   command   copies   files   with   very reasonable average transfer times, up to about 300 Kb/sec. This means that a 5MB  file  copies  from  the  ext2  partition  to  the  DOS  partition  in  about  15-20 seconds. The performance of these functions is helped considerably by the read- ahead  cache  that  is  implemented  in  the  library.  The  cd  command  sometimes pauses  for  no  more  than  about  0.5  sec  before  returning  the  command  prompt while it is reading the disk. However, the FIFO cache of recently read blocks has improved this.   Overall   the   project   has   been   successful   within   it’s   scope.   A   library containing the functions necessary to mount and read an ext2 filesystem (cd, ls and   cp)   along   with   a   Windows   based   command   line   interface   have   been produced that work, are reliable and perform reasonably well.