8.1. Analysis

The root disk has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a statically-linked shell. It now shares many features with the popular, ready-made distributions. For example it has:

• Several common utilities like cat, ls and so on.

• Startup scripts that automatically check and mount filesystems.

• Graceful shutdown capability.

• Support for multiple users and virtual terminals.

As a final test, we can put the root disk up against the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) requirements for the root filesystem. (We will ignore anything in the /usr hierarchy because of space constraints.) Compared to FHS requirement, the only files missing are a few commands in the /bin directory. Specifically, the root disk lacks the following commands:

• more

• ps

• sed

In addition to the required commands, it might be nice to include the "ed" editor listed as an option by the FHS. It is not as robust as vi or emacs, but it works and it should fit onto the tiny root filesystem.

So in order to finish up this phase of the project, we need to accomplish the following goals:

• Add the more, ps and sed commands.

• Install the optional ed editor.