PFS3 released on aminet

[XDelusion]

Double Plus Good!!!

I've heard great things about this software, at last I can finally check it out for my self (because I was too cheap to register). Thank you very much!

[Franko]

So for those of us who aren't smart, how do you change the file system of a partition?

Generally... all you should have to do is install PFS3 on the system you're using and then select the partition you'd like to make a PFS3 partition and with the likes of HDToolbox set that partition to PFS3, save the changes to the disks RDB then do a quick format of the partition...

Remember of course to backup anything first from the partition that you want to keep...

[runequester]

Excellent. This might be a stupid question, but I can update one partition to PFS, test it out, then do the others right?

That way I can do backups etc, a bit at a time.

[XDelusion]

And what I am wondering, is if I could take an 8Gb CF card, plug it into my MorphOS machine, partition it and format it with this file system, then plug it into my Amiga 1200 or what ever, and be able to do a WorkBench 3.1 install onto it.

Or, would I need to make a custom boot disk for my Amiga, then do the dirty work from there?

[klx300r]

many thnaks..I'd like to mess around with it once I get my 1200 back up & running:)

[Jope]

Excellent. This might be a stupid question, but I can update one partition to PFS, test it out, then do the others right?

That way I can do backups etc, a bit at a time.

Yes, given that PFS3 will fit on your RDB. Try and add it with any filesystems you already have installed, then you'll see.

And what I am wondering, is if I could take an 8Gb CF card, plug it into my MorphOS machine, partition it and format it with this file system, then plug it into my Amiga 1200 or what ever, and be able to do a WorkBench 3.1 install onto it.

Yes.

Or, would I need to make a custom boot disk for my Amiga, then do the dirty work from there?

That is also a possibility, but MOS should do fine.

[amigadave]

Thanks for the release of this great file system for the Amiga!

[Vulture]

@Michiel

Many thx!

@Piru

Great news

[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

[Lizard]

I just noticed PFs3 + sources really appeared in the recent uploads list:

m68k-amigaos    PFS3 V5.1
generic    Sources of PFS3

Thanks 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

[Piru]

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

Have you given any thought to how any future updates to the source code would be distributed? New uploads to aminet would be okay I guess, but something like a SVN repository would be even better. How about creating a project in sourceforge or so?

EDIT: heh, you got there first... :-)

[ChaosLord]

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

Piru is a hardcore coder.  He will totally help you.  I vouch for him.

You can safely set up a repository.  No need to delay.

[nicholas]

@Admins

This GENUINE "Amiga news" doesn't show up at the top of the home page, yet drivel from CUSA recently did.

Problem?

[Piru]

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

I would be very interested to participate. Years ago I already did some (private) binary patch to PFS3 to avoid certain "beta warning requester" that would pop up if large amounts of changes were committed to the FS (for instance if you deleted more than 1GB of data in a one go you'd easily get this requester). I did this by raising some buffer size. It raised the memory usage but made it possible to delete large amounts (tens of GBs) without any issues. (quick search: It appears to be that ResToBeFreed /* this should never happen */ does happen in some cases Anyhoo now I can see that my patch modified RTBF_CACHE_SIZE for the allocation and the comparison.)

Also I've already mentioned the resethandler improvement I'd like to add. Additionally I'd like to include support for the MorphOS 64bit dospacket interface (even though the FS itself only supports 32bit file sizes so far).

Also improvements to softlink support would be nice thing to have. At least making it work closer to how FFS works.

However, I'll be able to work on this may the earliest.