Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!cs.vu.nl!kjb
From: kjb@cs.vu.nl (Kees J Bot)
Subject: Re: FS size supported in 1.7
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References: <DJzBDs.4J7@bercos.de> <DJzzp7.EIt.0.-s@cs.vu.nl> <DK1JEA.A41@bercos.de>
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Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 1995 09:31:34 GMT
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hk@bercos.de (Helge Kruse) writes:

>Thank you for information. But I think about a file server. Disks with
>Gigabytes are available and so it's interesting to increase the 256 Mb
>Limit. The inode number should'nt be a problem, since it's a limit
>for the number of files. Large files doesn't consume much inode.
>Isn't it?

Minix doesn't have NFS, so it can't play file server.  So the only files
it needs to store are for itself.  Even under Minix-vmd we could live
with a 256 M limit, because none of the file systems we have made so far
is larger than that size.  (It already takes ages to fsck a file system
containing 200 M.)

>BTW: How does Minix (old) FS acces more than 64M? I saw the BLOCKS_SIZE
>defined as 1024 Bytes. 

The disk drivers use a 32-bit block number even under Minix 1.5.  So the
size of the disk or a partition is limited to 4 G as far as the drivers
are concerned.  FS further limits this to 2 G because file positions are
signed (off_t).  A file system is further limited by the maximum number
of 32 zone bit maps.  (One bit map can see 8 K zones = 8 M bytes for a
1 kb zone size.)
--
	                        Kees J. Bot  (kjb@cs.vu.nl)
	              Systems Programmer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
