nbdkit-floppy-plugin1

Usage

Overview

"nbdkit-floppy-plugin" is a plugin for nbdkit(1) which creates a virtual FAT-formatted floppy disk image from a directory on the fly. The files in the specified directory (and subdirectories) appear in the virtual floppy, which is served read-only over the NBD protocol.

The virtual floppy disk will have a single partition (using an MBR partition table). In that partition will be a virtual FAT32 filesystem containing the files. Long filenames are supported.

To create a CD/ISO, see nbdkit-iso-plugin(1). To create a Linux compatible virtual disk, see nbdkit-linuxdisk-plugin(1).

Note: The plugin does not save a temporary copy of the files, so you must leave the directory alone while nbdkit is running, else you may get an error (for example if the plugin tries to open one of the files which you have moved or deleted). This is different from how nbdkit-iso-plugin(1) and nbdkit-linuxdisk-plugin(1) work, as both of those plugins keep a temporary copy of the files and directories.

Examples

Create a virtual floppy disk:

 nbdkit floppy /path/to/directory

Parameters

[dir=]DIRECTORY

Specify the directory containing files and subdirectories which will be added to the virtual floppy disk. Files inside this directory will appear in the root directory of the virtual floppy.

This parameter is required.

"dir=" prefix may be omitted in most cases. See "Magic parameters" in nbdkit(1).

label=LABEL

The optional volume label for the filesystem. This may be up to 11 ASCII characters. If omitted, "NBDKITFLOPY" is used.

size=SIZE

Optional total disk size. If omitted then the disk will only be large enough to store all the files and directories from "DIRECTORY" with no free space.

Limitations

The maximum size of the disk is around 2TB. The maximum size of a single file is 4GB. Non-regular files (such as block special, symbolic links, sockets) are not supported and will be ignored.

The plugin does not support writes. nbdkit-cow-filter(1) can be placed on top to enable writes, but they will be thrown away when nbdkit exits and not written to the underlying directory.

The virtual floppy will not be bootable. This could be added in future (using SYSLINUX) but requires considerable work. As a workaround use nbdkit-iso-plugin(1) instead.

FAT32 is always used, even for small disks (where dosfstools, for example, would choose FAT12 or FAT16). This results in extra wasted space, but since it is only virtual wasted space it isn't really important, and it simplifies the implementation greatly.

Files

$plugindir/nbdkit-floppy-plugin.so

The plugin.

Use "nbdkit --dump-config" to find the location of $plugindir.

Version

"nbdkit-floppy-plugin" first appeared in nbdkit 1.8.