A/UX gripe

[Marc T. Kaufman]

Some comments on multiple HFS partitions:

In article <1991Mar15.224133.7433 at nas.nasa.gov> lumpkin at amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Forrest E. Lumpkin) writes:
>Last week I wrote:

->1) Will A/UX 2.0.1 resolve the problem( undocumented feature:-) )
->   of only one Mac partition per physical device (hard drive)?

>To which Kent Sandvik replied:

->Well, the trick with patching _HFSDispatch in order to fake multiple
->HFS volumes on one single volume has always been a hack, and thus
->is not suppored by neither A/UX or MacOS.

I was not aware that patching _HFSDispatch was required if the partitions
were "TRUE" (IM-V) apple partitions.  All that is required is a driver that
is aware enough to read the partition map and create multiple volume entries.

>To which Alexis Rosen replied:

->Please. It works. Thousands of people use it, and you should support it.
->No debate is permissible on this subject. :-)

And part of the reason No Debate is permissible, is that with multiple
partitions you get less dead space on the drive (because the allocation unit
is smaller) and potentially more files (split among the partitions) per
drive.

>I also wrote:

->2) Will the bugs in the installation software be resolved. With the present
->   software intelligent use of dp is required unless one is setting up
->   a one A/UX partition (/) hard disk arrangement?

>To which Kent Sandvik replied:

->This is a scary area, where the installation program can't guess
->all the possible arrangements that the administrator would wish
->to have. I've tested both CMS and Silverlining for A/UX disk
->partitioning, and even if their interfaces are bizarre, they do
->their job quite well.
>---stuff deleted-----
->Otherwise HD Setup with Apple harddisks asks for a rich set of
->possible A/UX setups before the installation. The installation
->software is quite different compared with the old A/UX 1.1
->installation program.

>To which Alexis Rosen replied:

->This is the real problem. It is disgraceful that HD Setup won't partition
->3rd party drives. I wouldn't mind if it could put drivers on them too, but
->that's not so critical. But Apple refuses to sell reasonably large disks,
->and sticks us with the archaic and arcane dp. I was under the strong
->impression that this was going to change in 2.0.1, but if I did hear such
->a commitment, it wasn't kept. What happened to "easy to use" and "great user
->interface"?

You don't have to know the magic SCSI commands to set up partitions on a
disk.  You only have to know GetCapacity, Read, and Write.  There is no
reason HD Setup could not set up partitions on a disk formatted (and driven)
by other software.

>Come on folks at Apple. ONE OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM'S MAIN FUNCTIONS IS TO
>EFFICIENTLY MANAGE FILES AND FILE STRUCTURES. UNIX is very popular because
>over twenty years ago the people at Bell Labs realized this and wrote
>an operating system with this in mind. Because of this foresight UNIX
>is a very expandable OS. We run it here at NASA on supercomputers and
>mass storage systems (with the ability to handle over a terabyte of data!)
>I read in MacWeek all the great things System 7.0 will provide the MacOS
>community (hot links, etc.), but I haven't read anything on improvements
>to the MacOS file system. Even modifying HS Setup to allow multiple HFS
>Partitions per physical device would be a help. But no - it seems Apple is
>intent on putting on several layers of frosting before they have finished baking
>the cake.

Moved and seconded.

Marc Kaufman (kaufman at Neon.stanford.edu)