Filesystems

I have been unable to use RISC OS for a while due to lack of space (building work going on) and my lapdock failing.

I am now in the situation that being able to get a system running again is not too far away.
(Maybe sooner if the pi-top gets a three button mouse like I requested).

Does it still have to use the horrible fat partition as a file overlapping an adfs partition kludge on a pi?

The last time I looked at the situation, ADFS could only be used as a superfloppy, but fat32fs understood partitions. has this changed in the interim? (4GB file support is now available on ADFS as I understand).

This situation really put me off RISC OS on the Pi, (the attraction of the device being the ability to support many systems, and the multiple boot system.) In the absence of partition support, I’d prefer to use the SD card as effectively just a ROM, and !Boot from a separate ADFS memory stick.

(What would be really nice would be a disk formatter, minimal !boot and !riscpkg in resourcefs, providing !boot were packaged).

I’m trying to decide whether to concentrate on the Pi or Iyonix, when I get space.

Does it still have to use the horrible fat partition as a file overlapping an adfs partition kludge on a pi?

Yes. The problem is that ADFS lacks support for partitions so an ADFS structure would be the only thing on that device…but all these SoCs expect to boot from a FAT partition.

There is a bounty for adding partition support (etc) to the filesystem, but even at £2.5K it remains unclaimed (perhaps due to the lack of people with sufficient low level expertise to even begin messing with the filesystem?) – https://www.riscosopen.org/bounty/polls/10

but fat32fs understood partitions.

FAT32FS is not part of RISC OS. It is a third party replacement for DOSFS (which has improved, but is not as good as FAT32FS).

(4GB file support is now available on ADFS as I understand).

I think so, and DOSFS. That was the first filesystem bounty – https://www.riscosopen.org/bounty/polls/9

This situation really put me off RISC OS on the Pi,

As long as you don’t delete the “Loader” file in !Boot, the system works quite well. The FAT stuff is marked in FileCore as being claimed by the Loader file, and the ADFS stuff simply doesn’t exist under Windows/Linux because the FAT part is only so big. It is a kludge, for sure, but one that seems to work quite well.

In the absence of partition support, I’d prefer to use the SD card as effectively just a ROM, and !Boot from a separate ADFS memory stick.

That is doable. There is no official image for the Beagle xM so I boot the Beagle from an SD card and everything loads up from a USB stick. Slow as molasses in Siberia, mind you. I’m not sure if the Beagle’s USB is slow or if it is the memory stick. Or both?

(What would be really nice would be a disk formatter, minimal !boot and !riscpkg in resourcefs, providing !boot were packaged).

You have HForm? I don’t recall now – I think I did a blog post or something – but I think I unpacked the harddisc4 image to RAMdisc, ran HForm, then once the USB stick was formatted, drag-copy the files from RAMdisc to it. Something like that.

Ideally, we need something nicer than HForm that formats with a reassuring-looking slidey bar and doesn’t ask a load of weird questions about CHS/LBA and drive geometry. How the heck do you specify how many “heads” a flash device has? ;-)

RiscPkg – unlikely to ever be in ROM if it is GPL.

I’m trying to decide whether to concentrate on the Pi or Iyonix, when I get space.

Iyonix – older, no longer produced, seems to be some sort of issue with the PSUs.

Pi – tiny, inexpensive, kinda powerful for the price, still being made, family of many types, and could be easily converted to serve other purposes. Once I have purchased a DVD and ripped it (I’m not sure my cathode ray era TV even works any more, plus it is so much more convenient to watch on a tablet or the like), if I want to watch it on a big screen I used to watch it on my PC which in the summer needs the internal fan hijacked to 100% plus a netbook cooler dual fan underneath simply to keep the machine around 68-72C while I’m watching the film.
Or…
Or I swap the SD on the Pi for the one with RaspBMC and plug in a USB stick and watch the film with total silence around (the Pi might gain a degree or two but it is nothing like the runaway heat source that is the Intel chipset). It is a bit slow to load, but once it is going it is a big pointy-clicky interface that I suspect even my mother could use…
Then when I’m done, swap SD card and it is RISC OS again.

Pi’s nice. ;-)