On 2017-02-05 19:21, Paul Koning wrote:

On Feb 5, 2017, at 7:55 AM, Johnny Billquist <[email protected]> wrote:

I'm not entirely clear about what you mean by "porting".

Are you talking about getting the files and file system across from one type of 
device to another? If so, it might depend on the file system in question, but 
for the ones I can think of, in general, you can just copy the content to a 
larger device and it works just fine. You will not get access to the extra 
space though, as the existing file system only knows about the blocks that 
existed when it was created.

For RSTS, that's often not true, for two reasons.  One is the "cluster size".  
There's the device cluster size and the pack cluster size.  The former is the power of two such 
that device size in blocks divided by that cluster size is <= 65536.  The pack cluster size 
is the file system allocation unit.  It must be >= the device cluster size.  If you put a 
small device file system on a larger device, it may have too small a pack cluster size.

The other, more limiting, issue is that the free cluster bitmap (file 
[0,1]satt.sys) must be large enough for the device the file system sits on.  If 
the pack cluster size still works for the device in question (for RL01 vs. RL02 
that would always be true) you may well have a bitmap file that's too short for 
the larger device.

Both of these issues will cause the OS to complain when you try to mount the 
file system.

Paul, I don't know much about the internals of RSTS/E (as you might know). Are RSTS/E going through these kind of checks on mount? In RSX, various kinds of parameters are stored in the FS home block, and what is used on all future mounts, and processing. These structures and data are just assumed to be inherently consistent, and no check is made against the actual disk drive, to check if the number of blocks on that device match against these structures.

The setting up of the values at file system initialization is taken from the device properties, and that is the only time when the relationship with the hardware is carried through.

And since some of these values are used for setting up various structures, it can be very hard to change the size of a file system after the fact in RSX, which is why I later on suggested that it's not something I would ever recommend anyone to try. But as long as you just live with the existing values, you will not have any problems with ODS-1 at least.

        Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: [email protected]             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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