Can a filesystem be larger than its base partition?

[Chris Rende]

In article <91317 at pyramid.pyramid.com>, csg at pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
> In article <308 at trux.UUCP> car at trux.UUCP (Chris Rende) writes:
> >On the Pyramid (BSD), Can a file system cross partition boundaries?
> 
> Sure. Using the -s option to newfs. We go both ways -- making the filesystem
> either larger or smaller than the standard size.
> 
> Be careful of doing this sortof thing on the 00 disk; OSx "knows" that 00b is
> for swapping, and will try to use that space for swapping whether you tell it
> to or not.

Are there any other gottcha's that OSx "knows" about?

Does the ROOT partition have to be 00a?

Can OSx somehow be told not to use 00b for swapping but rather look in
/etc/fstab for the information? (Is this one of those "Which came first:
the chicken or the egg" stories? I.e., can't get at /etc/fstab to find out
where the swap area is until the ROOT partition (00a) is mounted - and
can't get enough of the system started [in order to disk mount] without first
establishing a swap/paging area - so, just assume that 00b is a swap area)?

What I'm trying to do is increase the size of my ROOT and USR file systems
in order to make room for TOS 3.3 (OSx 4.4).

In order to make more room for my ROOT partition I can add 00b's blocks
into 00a, giving a 50Mb ROOT partition (I'd use 00a instead of 00j because
00a seems to have special meaning as a ROOT partition). But, from the info
above, OSx would trash my ROOT partition by writing swap/paging stuff into
it via 00b.

It looks like I have these choices for increasing the size of my file systems:

- Alter the partition "hard boundaries" to suite my needs (conf.c).
- Use VDISK to create small file systems to mount on /tmp, /usr/spool,
  /usr/adm, etc...
- Use symbolic links for dir's and files which grow so that the disk space
  is drawn from another file system.

None of these seem like clean solutions to me.

What have other people done to solve this problem?

car.
-- 
Christopher A. Rende           Central Cartage (Nixdorf/Pyramid/SysVR2/BSD4.3)
uunet!edsews!rphroy!trux!car   Multics,DTSS,Unix,Shortwave,Scanners,StarTrek
 trux!car at uunet.uu.net         Minix,PC/XT,Mac+,TRS-80 Model I,1802 ELF
       "I don't ever remember forgetting anything." - Chris Rende