Hi Mercury, thanks for having a look at the existing solutions, keep us posted.
Note that HFS+ is by Apple so it will also have license details. As Linux already supports HFS+ it seems that Apple is friendly on that. For ext2, note that you may be able to read ext3 and ext4 contents by compatibility, but must not write to such partitions with ext2- only drivers and tools... I agree that FAT LFN are super ugly implementation wise. I do not agree that file sizes above 2 GB are super important. You say it is good for archives and disk images. Which archive would pile up so much data in one file? For disk images, you should also have a way to MOUNT them. Which would have to support large sizes. Or at least tools to access (read and maybe even write) files on them. For example I myself have 10 files of 2 GB or larger 7 of which are 4 GB or larger, usually ISO9660 images or tarballs of large piles of files, such as entire Ubuntu Linux distros or backups. All less than 8 GB, by the way. To backup an entire drive, I would just copy that as-is to another drive and NOT try to make a 500 GB tarball. Because accessing files INSIDE such a 500 GB tarball would be very slow :-p If I had only DOS and no Linux, I would have DOS DVD burning tools and WGET style software which can split ISO images in 2 GB chunks. And I would use more but smaller ZIPs for backing up certain things. In short, I myself do not feel a big urge to have huge file support everywhere in my operating system and software, but it does not hurt. Besides, I think that FAT+ is an okay idea for the special needs of ISO image handling (store only the low 32 bits of file size in the directory entry of flagged-as-huge files, check FAT chain length to figure out actual size) when you only have a few extra large files. And talking about ISO, I repeat that super complete UDF support for DOS would be cool :-) But then, almost nobody even burns CD or DVD in DOS, so complete UDF read support might be sufficient. I really wonder whether UDF is useful as filesystem for flash storage media? Cheers, Eric PS Tom: What are the abilities and license of your 2010 exFAT tool? > Yes. I think it would be a nice addition to FreeDOS to be able to > finally work with large files. For some of today's files (archives and > entire system images come to mind) 4 GB just isn't enough. > The [LFN] internals are /quite/ ugly, which is why I would opt to break > compatibility with the old FAT variants and restructure any possible new > format as efficiently as possible. >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#Linux >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format >> http://www.catacombae.org/hfsexplorer/ > Thanks for the links! Lots of info, although I've checked some of it > out already. HFS+ may be a good option, I'll have to look into it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
