On 11/3/2023 5:55 AM, Alain Mouette via Freedos-user wrote:
Hi, I would like to clarify some things:
FreeDOS is limited to 2Gb files, some special programs can use 4Gb
(full 32 bits sector number) but it is not the norm.
In which way is "FreeDOS" limited to 2GB sized files? (Sorry, never
bothered wit such large files on DOS (any DOS)? The file size entry in
the FAT32 directory entry is a 4 byte integer. As a filesize can't be
negative, this should be a UINT_32/unsigned long and thus allow for
files up to 4GB. If the FAT32 enabled file functions of INT 21h do
handle this properly with a unsigned long, any program that does the
same and the programmer of an application didn't get lazy and just
assumes "signed long is big enough for everyone", then this should be a
problem of that application, not FreeDOS. If the respective routines in
the FreeDOS kernel do in fact handle the FAT32 file size entry as a
signed long, than this is a bug that needs to be fixed IMHO...
FAT32 is free, but IIRC there a patents problems with other newer formats
FAT32 itself was never patented, it was the long file name format and
handling that was covered by patents, which by now have expired. exFAT
is not really an extension like FAT12->FAT16->FAT32 where and doesn't
have such limitations, just doesn't have all that journal stuff that is
included in NTFS, which has become the standard file system ever since
Windows 2000 (and Microsoft intentionally limits the use/format of FAT32
partitions larger than 32GB).
Disk size is not a problem, I have routinely installed very big
partitions and FreeDOS can handle that just fine. Remember that
FerrDOS has evolved a lot over time.
Disk size limit should be 8TB, just like with any other FAT32
implementation.
Ralf
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