[Discussion] Hard Drive Partition Sizes

[Dave Yeo]

On 03/01/10 08:51 pm, Thomas Clayton wrote:
> Dear POSSI:
>
> Here I am REplying to my own question - with another pair of questions!
>
> Does it make ANY difference whether it is HPFS386 rather than HPFS?
>
> I had thought HPFS386 was, somehow, 32-bit and HPFS (since it started with OS/2 (1.x, "real" OS/2)), was 'only' 16-bit.
>
> I'd concluded, over the years of reading, that HPFS386 was 'really' an especially network enabled vn. of HPFS and NOT, necessarily, any more or less 32-bit than 'ordinary' HPFS.
>
> Wrong or correct?

The way I heard the story was that IBM and MS decided that a new file 
system was needed for the new OS/2. IBM who was paying, decided that 
both MS and IBM would write a file system and they would be compared. 
One of the requirements was that the filesystem would work on a 286 so 
16 bit, also the file system needed to be written in C.
MS wrote HPFS and won the competition. After it was decided to use HPFS 
IBM realized that HPFS was 32 bit and partially assembler. So IBM 
rewrote HPFS as 16 bit C code and the MS version became HPFS386.
So the advantages of HPFS386, besides supporting ACLs, is that it is 32 
bit code and critical parts are written in (presumably hand written) 
assembly. Also supports a large cache rather then regular HPFS's 2 MB.

>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Thomas Clayton
>
>> BTW, it does NOT matter WHAT size JFS partitions CAN BE,
>> I'm asking about HPFS ones!
>

Current OS/2 versions are limited to 64 GBs. Presumably the Linux 
version could be adapted to larger.
Also HPFS has that 2 GB file size limit.
Dave