Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!mirror!adelie!infinet!ulowell!page
From: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Giant disks
Message-ID: <9579@swan.ulowell.edu>
Date: 11 Oct 88 20:04:36 GMT
References: <4912@cbmvax.UUCP> <176@antares.UUCP> <1988Oct5.162955.22715@ziebmef.uucp>
Reply-To: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page)
Organization: University of Lowell, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 16

stevex@ziebmef.UUCP (Steve Tibbett) wrote:
>A 4096 byte block size would let you have 8 times the amount of storage
>the current 512 byte block size would before overflowing...

That's OK for DOS, bot not for Exec.  Exec wants IOStdReq's in terms
of byte offsets, and there's only 32 bits in the offset.  So your
proposal wouldn't work without some modification, to do something like
tell Exec that the offset is not in bytes, or put the high-order 32
bits in another place.  If you just decreed that the offset was in
terms of 'blocks' (which is driver/unit/partition dependent), you'd
break all existing I/O requests.

..Bob
-- 
Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept.  page@swan.ulowell.edu  ulowell!page
"I can't tell the difference between ABC News and Hill Street Blues" -Bono