Re: [MiNT] Partition sizes

[Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.co.uk>]

On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 16:43 +0200, Peter Slegg wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:37:02 , Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 17:22 +0200, Miro Kropacek wrote:
> > > > If there really is a 2GB limit in Mint fs then can it be increased ?
> > > >
> > > It's probably quite painful process as this 2GB limit is from using
> > > signed integers for storing file sizes. So every place where file
> > > sizes are used / calculated in both mintlib and freemint must be
> > > changed to something bigger (like 64-bit value) but I'm not really
> > > sure if it's even possible in all cases since most (all) GEMDOS calls
> > > return stuff in LONG (32-bit) and bit #31 is used as indicator for
> > > error => 2 GB limit. If this would be changed, 99% of existing apps
> > > would stop to work.
> >
> > Right. It's a non-trivial piece of work. But you essentially keep all
> > the existing system calls for backwards compatibility and invent new
> > 64bit calls for new applications.
> >
> > Essentially though. Any application currently written is only capable of
> > understanding up to 2GB.
> >
> > Alan.
> >
> 
> 
> What would happen if an "old" call tried to access a big file ? Would it
> handle the error ?

Potentially corruption, maybe truncating the file, if it opens it with
write access. Read only would just trigger an early EOF when it really
isn't.

> Would we need two different partition types ?

Partitions types, or rather filesystems - as a partition type is just a
value and it's the filesystem that has the characteristics, have their
own file size restrictions, see Davids post.

Alan.