problems on mounting a minix file system on ubuntu 10.10

Question

I wanna create and mount a minix fs image under ubuntu for study early file systems. And tried this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=minix1.img bs=1024 count=1440
sudo losetup /dev/loop0 minix1.img
sudo mkfs.minix /dev/loop0
mkdir minix1
sudo mount -t minix /dev/loop0 minix1
sudo touch hello.txt
sudo mkdir test

mounted ok, all work fine til now, but I could not read directories under the mount directory. While cd test, it displays a bash: cd: test: Not a directory

and ls -l gets:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  0 2010-11-25 15:37 hello.txt
?rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 64 2010-11-25 15:14 test

it's a ? where should be d :(

Thanks!

update: it's ubuntu 10.10 with 2.6.35-22 kernel, I've tried all above runs OK under a 10.04 system with a 2.6.32-21-generic kernel.

update: I've updated the kernel to 2.6.35-23 and the problem seems have been solved, though still feel weird about this. :(

Answer 1

ls is telling you that the root entry on the filesystem is not a directory but an unknown file type. You could see the precise file type with stat. This has to be either a bug in mkfs or in the kernel, and since it was solved by a kernel upgrade, the culprit must have been the kernel. I haven't investigated, but the bug might have been related to the minix: fix regression in minix_mkdir() change in 2.6.35-23.