Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned

Re:Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned by kjs3 on Friday February 17, 2023 @09:27AM (#34835009)

I used it all the time in the 90s and early 2000s to mount disk created on System V based systems, most notably SCO Unix, which was very popular at the time. Links were slow, NFS was sorta unreliable and had limitations, and FTP doesn't preserve filesystem attributes among other issues, and some use cases just require the actual filesystem, so it was often easier just to move/send a physical disk. I think I've even used it in the last 5 years to do some data recovery on an old SVR4 system for a friend. I won't be sad if it goes away, tho...these days I'd probably just image the disk and mount it on a VM running SCO or older Linux or some such. Time marches on...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned by Brian_K_White on Friday February 17, 2023 @10:44AM (#34835930)

Same. I used it periodically to recover data from expired hardware. Kids today don't have any idea that you couldn't just take a drive from an installed sco system and just boot it up on any other motherboard and hard drive controller. (well, there are wizard incantations that you won't know and won't be able to figure out in time) So couldn't boot the old system on the old dead hardware or on new hardware, couldn't buy a new copy of the old hardware... but you could mount the disk and get everything that matters.

A fuse implementation would be good enough today though. You're not doing actual production work on htfs today no matter how special the circumstances.

...and did anyone ever automate parsing the divvy partition table?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned by rbanffy on Friday February 17, 2023 @12:39PM (#34837726)

Imagine telling them we could boot the machine from a SCSI tape…

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned by kjs3 on Friday February 17, 2023 @02:24PM (#34839096)

Or manually repair the borked inode table with adb/fsdb.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned by Brian_K_White on Friday February 17, 2023 @05:48PM (#34841683)

You have to do it manually. You don't dare let fsck -y do it.

I confess I have never productively used either but have destructively used fsck.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned by kjs3 on Friday February 17, 2023 @02:22PM (#34839071)

You're not doing actual production work on htfs today no matter how special the circumstances.

Someone is, apparently. Some shop called Xinuos apparently bought part of the corpse (the not lawsuit obsessed, not fraud committing part, presumably) and is still selling SCO OpenServer and Unixware. That's some serious dead-ender computing. But hey...people still run OS/2 in production.

Divvy...haven't thought about that in not long enough.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned by chasil on Friday February 17, 2023 @01:08PM (#34838147)

There are many distributions based on long-term stable kernels that will have this driver. RedHat 8 and friends are supported until 2029 on a v4 kernel.

In the (far) future, just use a past distro to see them. Removal now wipes functionality from the market very, very slowly.

[ Parent | on HN ]