1.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
2
3=============================
4Overview of Amiga Filesystems
5=============================
6
7Not all varieties of the Amiga filesystems are supported for reading and
8writing. The Amiga currently knows six different filesystems:
9
10==============	===============================================================
11DOS\0		The old or original filesystem, not really suited for
12		hard disks and normally not used on them, either.
13		Supported read/write.
14
15DOS\1		The original Fast File System. Supported read/write.
16
17DOS\2		The old "international" filesystem. International means that
18		a bug has been fixed so that accented ("international") letters
19		in file names are case-insensitive, as they ought to be.
20		Supported read/write.
21
22DOS\3		The "international" Fast File System.  Supported read/write.
23
24DOS\4		The original filesystem with directory cache. The directory
25		cache speeds up directory accesses on floppies considerably,
26		but slows down file creation/deletion. Doesn't make much
27		sense on hard disks. Supported read only.
28
29DOS\5		The Fast File System with directory cache. Supported read only.
30==============	===============================================================
31
32All of the above filesystems allow block sizes from 512 to 32K bytes.
33Supported block sizes are: 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 bytes. Larger blocks
34speed up almost everything at the expense of wasted disk space. The speed
35gain above 4K seems not really worth the price, so you don't lose too
36much here, either.
37
38The muFS (multi user File System) equivalents of the above file systems
39are supported, too.
40
41Mount options for the AFFS
42==========================
43
44protect
45		If this option is set, the protection bits cannot be altered.
46
47setuid[=uid]
48		This sets the owner of all files and directories in the file
49		system to uid or the uid of the current user, respectively.
50
51setgid[=gid]
52		Same as above, but for gid.
53
54mode=mode
55		Sets the mode flags to the given (octal) value, regardless
56		of the original permissions. Directories will get an x
57		permission if the corresponding r bit is set.
58		This is useful since most of the plain AmigaOS files
59		will map to 600.
60
61nofilenametruncate
62		The file system will return an error when filename exceeds
63		standard maximum filename length (30 characters).
64
65reserved=num
66		Sets the number of reserved blocks at the start of the
67		partition to num. You should never need this option.
68		Default is 2.
69
70root=block
71		Sets the block number of the root block. This should never
72		be necessary.
73
74bs=blksize
75		Sets the blocksize to blksize. Valid block sizes are 512,
76		1024, 2048 and 4096. Like the root option, this should
77		never be necessary, as the affs can figure it out itself.
78
79quiet
80		The file system will not return an error for disallowed
81		mode changes.
82
83verbose
84		The volume name, file system type and block size will
85		be written to the syslog when the filesystem is mounted.
86
87mufs
88		The filesystem is really a muFS, also it doesn't
89		identify itself as one. This option is necessary if
90		the filesystem wasn't formatted as muFS, but is used
91		as one.
92
93prefix=path
94		Path will be prefixed to every absolute path name of
95		symbolic links on an AFFS partition. Default = "/".
96		(See below.)
97
98volume=name
99		When symbolic links with an absolute path are created
100		on an AFFS partition, name will be prepended as the
101		volume name. Default = "" (empty string).
102		(See below.)
103
104Handling of the Users/Groups and protection flags
105=================================================
106
107Amiga -> Linux:
108
109The Amiga protection flags RWEDRWEDHSPARWED are handled as follows:
110
111  - R maps to r for user, group and others. On directories, R implies x.
112
113  - If both W and D are allowed, w will be set.
114
115  - E maps to x.
116
117  - H and P are always retained and ignored under Linux.
118
119  - A is always reset when a file is written to.
120
121User id and group id will be used unless set[gu]id are given as mount
122options. Since most of the Amiga file systems are single user systems
123they will be owned by root. The root directory (the mount point) of the
124Amiga filesystem will be owned by the user who actually mounts the
125filesystem (the root directory doesn't have uid/gid fields).
126
127Linux -> Amiga:
128
129The Linux rwxrwxrwx file mode is handled as follows:
130
131  - r permission will set R for user, group and others.
132
133  - w permission will set W and D for user, group and others.
134
135  - x permission of the user will set E for plain files.
136
137  - All other flags (suid, sgid, ...) are ignored and will
138    not be retained.
139
140Newly created files and directories will get the user and group ID
141of the current user and a mode according to the umask.
142
143Symbolic links
144==============
145
146Although the Amiga and Linux file systems resemble each other, there
147are some, not always subtle, differences. One of them becomes apparent
148with symbolic links. While Linux has a file system with exactly one
149root directory, the Amiga has a separate root directory for each
150file system (for example, partition, floppy disk, ...). With the Amiga,
151these entities are called "volumes". They have symbolic names which
152can be used to access them. Thus, symbolic links can point to a
153different volume. AFFS turns the volume name into a directory name
154and prepends the prefix path (see prefix option) to it.
155
156Example:
157You mount all your Amiga partitions under /amiga/<volume> (where
158<volume> is the name of the volume), and you give the option
159"prefix=/amiga/" when mounting all your AFFS partitions. (They
160might be "User", "WB" and "Graphics", the mount points /amiga/User,
161/amiga/WB and /amiga/Graphics). A symbolic link referring to
162"User:sc/include/dos/dos.h" will be followed to
163"/amiga/User/sc/include/dos/dos.h".
164
165Examples
166========
167
168Command line::
169
170    mount  Archive/Amiga/Workbench3.1.adf /mnt -t affs -o loop,verbose
171    mount  /dev/sda3 /Amiga -t affs
172
173/etc/fstab entry::
174
175    /dev/sdb5	/amiga/Workbench    affs    noauto,user,exec,verbose 0 0
176
177IMPORTANT NOTE
178==============
179
180If you boot Windows 95 (don't know about 3.x, 98 and NT) while you
181have an Amiga harddisk connected to your PC, it will overwrite
182the bytes 0x00dc..0x00df of block 0 with garbage, thus invalidating
183the Rigid Disk Block. Sheer luck has it that this is an unused
184area of the RDB, so only the checksum doesn't match anymore.
185Linux will ignore this garbage and recognize the RDB anyway, but
186before you connect that drive to your Amiga again, you must
187restore or repair your RDB. So please do make a backup copy of it
188before booting Windows!
189
190If the damage is already done, the following should fix the RDB
191(where <disk> is the device name).
192
193DO AT YOUR OWN RISK::
194
195  dd if=/dev/<disk> of=rdb.tmp count=1
196  cp rdb.tmp rdb.fixed
197  dd if=/dev/zero of=rdb.fixed bs=1 seek=220 count=4
198  dd if=rdb.fixed of=/dev/<disk>
199
200Bugs, Restrictions, Caveats
201===========================
202
203Quite a few things may not work as advertised. Not everything is
204tested, though several hundred MB have been read and written using
205this fs. For a most up-to-date list of bugs please consult
206fs/affs/Changes.
207
208By default, filenames are truncated to 30 characters without warning.
209'nofilenametruncate' mount option can change that behavior.
210
211Case is ignored by the affs in filename matching, but Linux shells
212do care about the case. Example (with /wb being an affs mounted fs)::
213
214    rm /wb/WRONGCASE
215
216will remove /mnt/wrongcase, but::
217
218    rm /wb/WR*
219
220will not since the names are matched by the shell.
221
222The block allocation is designed for hard disk partitions. If more
223than 1 process writes to a (small) diskette, the blocks are allocated
224in an ugly way (but the real AFFS doesn't do much better). This
225is also true when space gets tight.
226
227You cannot execute programs on an OFS (Old File System), since the
228program files cannot be memory mapped due to the 488 byte blocks.
229For the same reason you cannot mount an image on such a filesystem
230via the loopback device.
231
232The bitmap valid flag in the root block may not be accurate when the
233system crashes while an affs partition is mounted. There's currently
234no way to fix a garbled filesystem without an Amiga (disk validator)
235or manually (who would do this?). Maybe later.
236
237If you mount affs partitions on system startup, you may want to tell
238fsck that the fs should not be checked (place a '0' in the sixth field
239of /etc/fstab).
240
241It's not possible to read floppy disks with a normal PC or workstation
242due to an incompatibility with the Amiga floppy controller.
243
244If you are interested in an Amiga Emulator for Linux, look at
245
246http://web.archive.org/web/%2E/http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/
247