vdisk.device is a driver for a recoverable RAM disk. It started in 1993 as
a hack of ASDG-RAM (written by Perry S. Kivolowitz). These hacked versions
(1.3 -> 1.12) were not distributed.
As of version 2.0, it has been entirely rewritten, with many new features
added:
- Up to 16 units with virtually unlimited size (512 Mb to 2 Gb)
- Sector size of 512, 1024 or 2048 bytes (version 3 and up)
- Dynamic memory allocation and (optionnaly) deallocation
- Full support of standard AmigaDOS Filesystems (DOS\0 to DOS\5).
- Will survive the heaviest system crashes as long as its own data is not
corrupted.
- In case of a recovery failure, the cause can be reported by a support
command.
- Supports automounting/autobooting units as of V3.3.
- Supports volatile units that don't keep their content across reboots as of
V3.5.
VDisk requires AmigaDOS 2.04 or higher (V37).
CHANGES
V 3.8
- Fixed illegal memory accesses during initialization of big volumes with
bitmap extension blocks. Thanks to Dale Frameli for the bug report.
V 3.7
- Fixed a nasty data corruption bug in the unit cleaning routine.
V 3.6
- Fixed Expunge and Init routines to allow removal and reloading of the
device without system reboot. Also, a delayed expunge would have crashed
due to mismatched stack usage.
- Official release of vdisk V3.
V 3.5 beta (internal)
- Added support for VOLATILE units that will be wiped clean on system
reboot like the system RAM: disk.
V 3.4 beta
- Added NOCLEAN flag to completely disable memory reclamation for vdisk
units used as virtual floppies.
- New AmigaDOS units now get preallocated bitmap blocks for compatibility
with the new FFS2.
V 3.3 beta
- Added support for AUTOMOUNT and BOOTABLE vdisk units. This requires
the vdisk.device to be installed as a resident module with THOR's
LoadModule command.
- Some extended trackdisk commands are now accepted as a compatibility
kludge for broken software like DMS that can't be bothered to fall
back to the normal commands. They are not officially supported and
should otherwise not be used.
- TD_GETGEOMETRY now returns the AmigaDOS faked geometry in CHS fields
and the real number of available sectors in the TotalSectors field.
(some of which might not be available to AmigaDOS).
V 3.2 beta
- Corrected a stupid bug in the unit checksum routine, which read
past the end of the unit structure (yuck!).
V 3.1 beta
- Major changes. Internal VTrack size is now 32 sectors which can
themselves use sizes of 512, 1024 or 2048 bytes. The device now
also accepts AmigaDOS faked geometries (so a unit can look like
a floppy for example) as long as LowCyl is 0, SectorPerBlocks
is 1 and Reserved is 2. The filesystem root block should be
correctly placed as well.
- Initialization recovery checks reworked so they no longer reference
memory not yet reallocated.
- 'muFS' DosType is now recognized and supported, although the
current multiuser.library only allows the MultiUserFileSystem
on hard disk partitions.
- NSCMD_DEVICEQUERY and TD_GETGEOMETRY commands are now supported.
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