The Advanced Disc Filing System (ADFS) is a computing file system particular to the Acorn computer range and RISC OS based successors.

Initially based on the rare Acorn Winchester Filing System, it was renamed to the Advanced Disc Filing System when support for floppy discs was added (utilising a WD1770 Floppy Disc Controller) and on later 32 bit systems a variant of a PC style Floppy controller.

Acorn's original Disc Filing System was rather limited in that few files could be stored on a disk, and directory and file names were restricted to 1 and 7 characters respectively. The Disc filing systems limitations were in part due to its basis on the disc firmware used in the earlier Acorn Atom and System 3,6 Eurocard computers.

To overcome some of these restrictions Acorn developed ADFS. The most dramatic change was the introduction of a hierarchical directory structure. The filename length increased from 7 to 10 letters and the number of files in a directory expanded to 47. It retained some superficial attributes from DFS; the directory separator continued to be a dot and $ now indicated the hierarchical root of the filesystem. ^ was used to refer to the parent directory and \ was the previously visited directory.

8 Bit usage

ADFS on 8-Bit systems required a WD1770 or later 1772 series floppy controller, owing to the inability of the original Intel 8271 chip to cope with the dual density format ADFS required. ADFS could however be used to support a hard disc without a 1770 controller present.

The relevant floppy controller (1770) was directly incorporated into the design of the Master Series and B+ models , and was available as an 'upgrade' board for the earlier Model B. The Acorn Electron's floppy interface was an add-on unit, initially available through Acorn and later Pres (aka Advanced Computer Products)

It supported hard discs, and 3½" floppy discs formatted up to 640k capacity using double density MFM encoding (L format; single-sided disks were supported with the S format (160k) and M format (320k)).

ADFS as implemented in the BBC microcomputer system (and later RISC OS) has never had support for single density floppy.

Hard disc support in ADFS used a modified format, and interfaced to a SCSI based Winchester unit via the BBC Micro's 1Mhz Bus . Support for IDE/ATAPI style drives has been added 'unofficially' by third parties in recent years.

32 bit usage (Arthur & RISC-OS)

On 32 bit systems, a WD 1770 or 1772 was initially used as a floppy controller on the early machines of the range. Later models utilised a PC style multi-io controller requiring slight changes to ADFS.

In addition to legacy support for the 'L' type format Arthur and later RISC OS provided enhanced formats which overcome the limitations of the BBC Micro.

Arthur added, D format with 77 entries per directory as opposed to the previous 47, also usable on hard discs and a new 800k double density floppy format. A per-file "type" attribute was added in space previously used to store Load and Execute addresses. The 12 bits of type information is used to denote the contents or intended use of a file. This is similar to the 32-bit type attributes stored in Apple's HFS file system, and conceptually comparable to the more general use of MIME Types by the BeOS operating system.

RISC OS brought in E (and later F) format for dual and high density discs respectively. These formats support file fragmentation (with the so-called "new map").

RISC OS 4 added E+ format which allowed for long filenames and more than 77 files per directory

More recent versions of RISC OS, including those for Iyonix continue to provide ADFS, and have further extended it to cope with larger hard disc sizes.

Unlike the 8 bit implementation, ADFS as implemented on RISC OS is not monolithic. A system module called "ADFS" provides no more than the block driver and user interfaces, where the "FileCore" module contains the actual file system implementation, and FileSwitch contains the VFS and high-level file-access API implementations. This allows for other hardware to use the ADFS format easily, such as IDEFS (commonly used for IDE add-on cards), SCSIFS, and the network-aware AppFS. FileCore and FileSwitch's functions are in some ways similar to the IFS and IO system managers in Windows NT.

This flexibility has allowed other filing systems to be implemented into RISC OS relatively easily.

Support for ADFS on other platforms

The Linux kernel has ADFS support for E format and later.

Tools such as Omniflop (in Windows 2000 and later), and Libdsk support permit the 'physical' layout of ADFS floppies to be read on PC systems utilising an internal drive. However the logical structure remains unimplemented.

References

• Watford Electronics,"The Advanced Reference Manual for the BBC Master Series",1988 (p169)
• Acorn Computers Ltd,"The BBC Microcomputer System Master Series Reference Manual Part1",Part No, 0443-001,Issue 1,March 1986 -(Pages (J.10-1 to J10-3)

External links

• ADFS on disk layout documentation

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