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- Amiga filesystems Overview
- ==========================
-
- Not all varieties of the Amiga filesystems are supported for reading and
- writing. The Amiga currently knows 6 different filesystems:
-
- DOS\0 The old or original filesystem, not really suited for
- hard disks and normally not used on them, either.
- Supported read/write.
-
- DOS\1 The original Fast File System. Supported read/write.
-
- DOS\2 The old "international" filesystem. International means that
- a bug has been fixed so that accented ("international") letters
- in file names are case-insensitive, as they ought to be.
- Supported read/write.
-
- DOS\3 The "international" Fast File System. Supported read/write.
-
- DOS\4 The original filesystem with directory cache. The directory
- cache speeds up directory accesses on floppies considerably,
- but slows down file creation/deletion. Doesn't make much
- sense on hard disks. Supported read only.
-
- DOS\5 The Fast File System with directory cache. Supported read only.
-
- All of the above filesystems allow block sizes from 512 to 32K bytes.
- Supported block sizes are: 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 bytes. Larger blocks
- speed up almost everything with the expense of wasted disk space. The speed
- gain above 4K seems not really worth the price, so you don't lose too
- much here, either.
-
- The muFS (multi user File System) equivalents of the above file systems
- are supported, too.
-
- Mount options for the AFFS
- ==========================
-
- protect If this option is set, the protection bits cannot be altered.
-
- uid[=uid] This sets the uid of the root directory (i. e. the mount point
- to uid or to the uid of the current user, if the =uid is
- omitted.
-
- gid[=gid] Same as above, but for gid.
-
- setuid[=uid] This sets the owner of all files and directories in the file
- system to uid or the uid of the current user, respectively.
-
- setgid[=gid] Same as above, but for gid.
-
- mode=mode Sets the mode flags to the given (octal) value, regardless
- of the original permissions. Directories will get an x
- permission, if the corresponding r bit is set.
- This is useful since most of the plain AmigaOS files
- will map to 600.
-
- reserved=num Sets the number of reserved blocks at the start of the
- partition to num. Default is 2.
-
- root=block Sets the block number of the root block. This should never
- be necessary.
-
- bs=blksize Sets the blocksize to blksize. Valid block sizes are 512,
- 1024, 2048 and 4096. Like the root option, this should
- never be necessary, as the affs can figure it out itself.
-
- quiet The file system will not return an error for disallowed
- mode changes.
-
- verbose The volume name, file system type and block size will
- be written to the syslog.
-
- prefix=path Path will be prefixed to every absolute path name of
- symbolic links on an AFFS partition. Default = /
-
- volume=name When symbolic links with an absolute path are created
- on an AFFS partition, volume will be prepended as the
- volume name. Default = "" (empty string).
-
- Handling of the Users/Groups and protection flags
- =================================================
-
- Amiga -> Linux:
-
- The Amiga protection flags RWEDRWEDHSPARWED are handled as follows:
-
- - R maps to r for user, group and others. On directories, R implies x.
-
- - If both W and D are allowed, w will be set.
-
- - If both R and S are set, x will be set.
-
- - H, P and E are always retained and ignored under Linux.
-
- - A is always reset when written.
-
- User id and group id will be used unless set[gu]id are given as mount
- options. Since most of the Amiga file systems are single user systems
- they will be owned by root.
-
- Linux -> Amiga:
-
- The Linux rwxrwxrwx file mode is handled as follows:
-
- - r permission will set R for user, group and others.
-
- - w permission will set W and D for user, group and others.
-
- - x permission of the user will set S for plain files.
-
- - All other flags (suid, sgid, ...) are ignored and will
- not be retained.
-
- Newly created files and directories will get the user and group id
- of the current user and a mode according to the umask.
-
- Symbolic links
- ==============
-
- Although the Amiga and Linux file systems resemble each other, there
- are some, not always subtle, differences. One of them becomes apparent
- with symbolic links. While Linux has a file system with exactly one
- root directory, the Amiga has a seperate root directory for each
- file system (i. e. partition, floppy disk, ...). With the Amiga,
- these entities are called "volumes". They have symbolic names which
- can be used to access them. Thus, symbolic links can point to a
- different volume. AFFS turns the volume name into a directory name
- and prepends the prefix path (see prefix option) to it.
-
- Example:
- You mount all your Amiga partitions under /amiga/<volume> (where
- <volume> is the name of the volume), and you give the option
- "prefix=/amiga/" when mounting all your AFFS partitions. (They
- might be "User", "WB" and "Graphics", the mount points /amiga/User,
- /amiga/WB and /amiga/Graphics). A symbolic link referring to
- "User:sc/include/dos/dos.h" will be followed to
- "/amiga/User/sc/include/dos/dos.h".
-
- Examples
- ========
-
- Command line
- mount Archive/Amiga/Workbench3.1.adf /mnt -t affs -o loop,reserved=4
- mount /dev/sda3 /Amiga -t affs
-
- /etc/fstab example
- /dev/sdb5 /d/f affs ro
-
- Bugs, Restrictions, Caveats
- ===========================
-
- Quite a few things may not work as advertised. Not everything is
- tested, though several hundred MB have been read and written using
- this fs.
-
- Filenames are truncated to 30 characters without warning.
-
- Currently there are no checks against invalid characters (':')
- in filenames.
-
- Case is ignored by the affs in filename matching, but Linux shells
- do care about the case. Example (with /mnt being an affs mounted fs):
- rm /mnt/WRONGCASE
- will remove /mnt/wrongcase, but
- rm /mnt/WR*
- will not since the names are matched by the shell.
-
- The block allocation is designed for hard disk partitions. If more
- than 1 process writes to a (small) diskette, the blocks are allocated
- in an ugly way (but the real AFFS doesn't do much better). This
- is also true when space gets tight.
-
- The bitmap valid flag in the root block may not be accurate when the
- system crashes while an affs partition is mounted. There's currently
- no way to fix this without an Amiga (disk validator) or manually
- (who would do this?). Maybe later.
-
- A fsck.affs and mkfs.affs will probably be available in the future.
- Until then, you should do
- ln -s /bin/true /etc/fs/mkfs.affs
-
- It's not possible to read floppy disks with a normal PC or workstation
- due to an incompatibility with the Amiga floppy controller.
-
- If you are interested in an Amiga Emulator for Linux, look at
-
- http://www-users.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~crux/uae.html
-