PFS3 released on aminet

[MichielP]

Good news: I just uploaded PFS3 and sources to Aminet.
Enjoy!

Michiel Pelt
author of PFS3

[MichielP]

Excellent news. There most certainly will be a MorphOS port at least, and license permitting it will be included in future MorphOS releases directly.

Current 68k PFS3 already works fine in MorphOS so there shouldn't be any major trouble porting it.

It has a BSD license. So yes, you can include it in MorphOS, and yes, you can modify it for your needs.

Michiel

[MichielP]

Filesize limit is 2GiB-1 bytes. Partition size limit (about) 107GiB. HDD size limit is 2TiB as far as I can remember.

Once the current PFS3 is running we'll probably look into cause of those limits and see if it might be possible to adjust them. That'd lead into binary incompatible new version though.

So even if a new incompatible version is created we'll also keep a version compatible with the "original" PFS3 around for sure (so that you can easily mount legacy AmigaOS PFS3 partitions).

There are two PFS3 versions (actually more, but not relevant to this discussion), one that uses the standard disk interface and one that uses direct scsi. The standard disk interface version obviously doesn't support large file or partitions because it uses a 32 bit partition offset in bytes. So there you have the maximum.

The direct SCSI version also uses 32 bit offsets, but here the offset is not in bytes, but in 512 blocks. So there you have 2TB. In theory at least. At the time PFS was released such disks did not exist, so this was not actually tested.

A few problems with large disks have already been reported and I intend to have a look at it.

[MichielP]

It is good to see there are some people interested in extending PFS and bugfixing. The potential problem of separate incompatible PFS versions has been raised. How about collaborating - enhance PFS together instead of spreading our efforts into subprojects. I could set up a public domain source repository. Github perhaps, or something similar.

Please note that this only makes sense to me if there are at least some people intending to participate. Please let met know.

Michiel

[MichielP]

I just put PFS on sourceforge. See the new thread I created for this.

[MichielP]

Thanks for this nice software release.
I'm trying to upgrade from v5.1 to 5.3 but it's asking for the cd??
How can I upgrade to v.5.3 ?

I want to install this nice pice of software in my new FPGA Replayboard (i'm installing now).

Good question. I guess I have to fix that :hammer:

[MichielP]

Very cool.  :-)

It would also be nice for us users with far more limited Amiga's if a version
with a lower memory foot print could be created  PFS3 150K memory requirement is just too high to be useful on a Minimig with only 1.5M (or my 1MB A500 with external HD) of usable but a version with a similar memory foot print to FFS would be very useful if it PFS3 could be slimmed down a bit.

Increasing the maximum partition size and file size also increases the memory footprint. PFS already what is called internally as smallmode which is used if the partition is 4G or smaller. Smallmode has a smaller memory footprint. Perhaps we can reduce it further. However, PFS will always need more than FFS to be able to do the atomic commit scheme.

[MichielP]

If anyone is interested. I have a modified spatch from years ago that doesn't do CRC checking.

Would be a bad idea to put it on Aminet though.

This might be able to patch PFS3 but i'm just going to guess here that since it'd be patching something likely built with a different compiling environment (no matter how insignificant the difference might be) and slightly changed sources, that the result would just be garbage.

This might work. The reason spatch doesn't work is that the binaries on the Aminet release are already registered with a registration number. The patches are from the unregistered binaries from the CD. So the binaries differ and so the CRCs differ. But if you use your non-checking spatch and be very careful to apply the right patch to the right file it might just work.

You can also hold on and wait - I will post updated binaries, the complete package, not a patch, in a few days.

Michiel