[TUHS] Re: 'Huge' file support removed from PWB1

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>]

Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> writes:

> In PWB1, support for 'huge' files appears to have been removed.

They did make various changes to the system to protect against resource
exhaustion in what was a genuine production multi-user facility, and
might possibly have made such a change to ensure that a runaway process
couldn't write a file more than a megabyte in size.

It's not mentioned in the PWB article in the special UNIX issue of the
Bell System Technical Journal, though, and that article does describe
various changes they'd made, explaining how and why.

However: PWB grew out of Research, side by side with it, evaluating and
adopting changes along the way.  They aimed to stay mostly in synch,
but chose to keep and maintain a number of differences.  Maybe they
started their work before the "huge" file support was introduced, and
then simply did not include that change?  It's a backward incompatible
change (at least if you have at least one file that already uses the
last indirect block of its inode), and they might have decided to cross
that bridge if and when they ever got to it.

-tih
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