From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 09:12:08 -0400
From: jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com
Subject: [9fans] seek offset
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 804602a2-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19980916131208.Z0RV7uBkqkNrO2jIH7_nkEQ1lkPU3SFoYuLelZaUHhk@z>

As Russ points out, fixing Plan9 and the bootstrap to deal with
discs >4GB is fairly easy, although you are still limited to a partition
size of 4GB.

The offset and return value of the seek system call in Brazil is 64-bits.
How much work it was to do is hard to gauge as it happened in a fairly
uncoordinated manner over a period of time and there are still corners to
straighten out. One thing to note is the order of the component parts of
Length in /386/include/u.h of the Plan 9 distribution is wrong...


When Presotto did the Plan 9 x86 port, it was to a Safari laptop with a
16MHz 386, 4MB memory and an 80MB disc and a serial-line for networking.
It was hard then to imagine a PC with a disc >10GB, let alone the fact that
I'm writing this on a cpu-server with 4 400MHz Xeon processors each with
1MB L2 cache, 2GB main memory, no disc and a full-duplex 100Mb ethernet.

--jim