Re: Partitions: Amiga RDB partition on 2 TB disk way too big, while OK in AmigaOS 4.1

[Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Am Sonntag, 17. Juni 2012 schrieb Geert Uytterhoeven:
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Martin Steigerwald 
> <Martin@lichtvoll.de> wrote:
> > Am Sonntag, 17. Juni 2012 schrieb jdow:
> > | JXFS 64 bit file system
> > | 
> > | With AmigaOS 4.x a new file system has been introduced called JXFS.
> > | It is a totally new 64 bit file system that supports partitions up
> > | to 16 TB in size. It is a modern journalling file system, which
> > | means that it reduces data loss if data writes to the disk are
> > | interrupted. It is the fastest and most reliable file system ever
> > | created for AmigaOS.
> > 
> > http://www.amigaos.net/content/1/features
> > 
> > Well I asked AmigaOS 4 developers about this issue as well. Lets see
> > what they say about 2 TB limits.
> 
> 16 TB = 2 TB * 8. Perhaps they increased the block size from 512 to
> 4096?
> 
> block/partitions/amiga.c reads the block size from
> RigidDiskBlock.rdb_BlockBytes,
> but after conversion to 512-byte blocks, all further calculations are
> done on "int", so it will overflow for disks larger than 2 TiB.

Meanwhile I got a response from a AmigaOS 4 developer.

I documented the stuff as I understood it in the AmigaOS wiki:

| Disk size
|
| The RDB has a quite high limit on the maximum device size, but note that 
| currently each filesystem interprets the partition layout by itself.

| The raw, theoretical limit on the maximum device capacity is about 2^105 
| bytes:
|
| 32 bit rdb_Cylinders * 32 bit rdb_Heads * 32 bit rdb_Sectors * 512 
| bytes/sector for the HD size in struct RigidDiskBlock
|
| It's even much more if the sector size (rdb_BlockBytes and de_SizeBlock) 
| is larger than 512 bytes, but AmigaOS 4.1 doesn't support anything but 
| 512 bytes/sector HDs yet.
|
| Partition size
|
| For the partitions the maximum size is:
| 32 bit (de_HighCyl + 1 - de_LowCyl) (to get the partition size) * 32 bit 
| de_Surfaces * 32 bit de_SectorsPerTrack * 512 bytes/sector in struct 
| DosEnvec (=pb_Environment[]) in struct PartitionBlock.
|
| That's from the physical drive part, the actual disk size limit for the 
| partitions may be much smaller depending on the partitioning software, 
| if it's only using the logical sizes instead, which is likely the case, 
| it's only 8 ZiB with 512 bytes/sector: 32 bit rdb_HiCylinder * 32 bit 
| rdb_CylBlocks * 512 bytes/sector = 2^73 bytes. For using the logical 
| sizes using simple uint64 calculations (with some overflow checks) should 
| be enough, for more a math library with support for larger integers 
| needs to be used which probably no partitioning software does.
|
| But note: Nothing in struct RigiDiskBlock is used by the file systems for 
| mounting the partitions, they only get the information from the struct 
| PartitionBlock blocks, it's only a problem for the partitioning software 
| creating the partitions correctly - as soon as there are HDs larger than 
| 8 ZB while still using 512 bytes/sector if that ever happens.

http://wiki.amigaos.net/index.php/RDB

Please note that the documentation there might be updated or corrected in 
the future. But thats the current state.

> Note that in your profile-binary.img, the field is 0x200, i.e. 512
> bytes per block,
> so I'll have to get a deeper look into your RDB first...

I am a bit overwhelmed by Joanne´s analysis. I didn´t yet take time to 
completely read and try to understand it. I first wanted to get this 
information out.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
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