Subject: RE: How do I get VMS (ducking now)
To: None <port-vax@netbsd.org>
From: Carlini, Antonio <Antonio.Carlini@riverstonenet.com>
List: port-vax
Date: 06/12/2001 00:57:14
der Mouse wrote:
> How...bizarre.  What on earth produces that limit?  I've seen 

The console uses the older-style commands that 
address blocks using a 21-bit index. So that
gives you 2097152 uniquely addressable 512-byte
blocks, i.e. 1048576KB (where K=1024). Now disk 
manufacturers happen to quote MB and GB in 
millions and thousands of millions of bytes so take 
the above number, multiply by 1024 to get 
1073741824 bytes and turn into disk GB to get 
about 1.073GB.

I don't think the 32-bit commands existed at
the time the original VS3100/uV3100 console
code was written. 

The code was later updated to use the 32-bit
commands so the later uV3100 and VS4000 machines
can presumably access disks in excess of 2TB or so.
That probably looked hugely excessive at the time,
but we only need a x10 increase to reach it!

Antonio