More new components. The FFS, fast file system. This is still the Amiga FFS, based on the same assembly code we had before, with a couple of bugs fixed here and there, and with a couple of new features. First, some bug fixes: The computation of the size of the bitmap contained an off-by-one error, which triggered in rare cases a run of the disk-validator every time the FFS was booted. There are now additional size checks for the size of the volume name.
Concerning file name sizes: The FFS supports now two new "flavours", namely DOS\06 and DOS\07, which support "long file names" using the same layout as in AOS 4. File names can now be 106 characters long. This means in worst case that the FFS needs to allocate an extra block for holding the comment as well, which required additional logic.
Another new feature is that the FFS speaks TD64, NSD and SCSI natively, there is no longer the need for NSDPatch as the FFS is in most cases capable to figure out the command set itself. Hence, if you run a hostadapter based on the omniscsi, or the oktagon, or phase5 boards, large partitions and large harddrives are no longer a problem. Just a small warning: If you make your partitions large, it is advisable to also enlarge the block size - I suggest 4K blocks for flash based media - as otherwise the bitmap grows too large and thus slows booting the system down as it first goes through a minimal validation step that requires to hold the entire bitmap in memory. Furthermore, 4K blocks also help wear-leveling of the flash disk as they organize their internal memory also in larger pages than the usual 512 byte size.
SCSI transfer need to be enabled manually, but the HDToolbox can do that for you. Or the mount option "DirectSCSI=1" if you mount manually.
Concerning mount options, there are two new: "EnableNSD" enables usage of the NSD command set, which is "on" by default, but can be turned off in case the firmware of the hostadapter has problems with it, and "Superfloppy", which allows automatic sizing on removable media. Say, if you have a ZIP drive that supports both 100MB and 250MB media, *do not* put an RDB on it, mount it with "Superfloppy=1" and the FFS will figure out the drive geometry itself, and will resize the drive geometry itself, same as it does when switching between HD and DD disks.
Last but not least, there is one "hidden" feature we do not support officially, and this is DOS\08. Nobody remembers how, but Os 3.9 already supported it, albeit incompletely. It is an FFS variant that supports long file names limited to 54 characters, but that is backwards compatible to the older flavours of the FFS such that you can easily upgrade from DOS\03 to DOS\08, gain additional length, but do not need to reformat. Unlike the Os 3.9 variant, this version works, however. We still do not support it officially as diskdoctor (another story for another article) does not support it, but it is otherwise in fine working condition.