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AncientFS: reading the filesystems of the old Unixes, now on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD

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Amit Singh announces that he has ported AncientFS from Mac to GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, thus allowing these filesystems to be read. There were tape dumps from the 70s of these files, which ran the risk of falling into oblivion without any software on current operating systems that could read them. With AncientFS all this material is now a little more within everybody’s reach.

AncientFS uses FUSE technology (Filesystem in Userpace – Filesystems in Userspace), which allows users without administrator privileges to create and mount filesystems in their userspace.

The idea of mounting filesystems in userspace comes from Plan 9, conceived as the successor to Unix, and although so far without media success, this and other ideas are little by little taking hold in the Unix world (GNU, BSD).

This idea in Plan 9 is called 9P (Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol) and is currently supported in the linux 2.4 or 2.6 kernel through v9fs.

The formats supported by AncientFS are:

          v1tap       DECtape 'tap' tape archive; UNIX V1
          v2tap       DECtape 'tap' tape archive; UNIX V2
          v3tap       DECtape 'tap' tape archive; UNIX V3
          ntap        DECtape/magtape 'tap' tape archive; 1970 epoch
          tp          DECtape/magtape 'tp' tape archive
          itp         UNIX 'itp' tape archive
          dtp         UNIX 'dtp' tape archive
          dump        Incremental file system dump (512-byte blocks, V7/bsd)
          dump1k      Incremental file system dump (1024-byte blocks, V7/bsd)
          dump-vn     Incremental file system dump (512-byte blocks, bsd-vn)
          dump1k-vn   Incremental file system dump (1024-byte blocks, bsd-vn)
          v1ar        Very old (0177555) archive (.a) from First Edition UNIX
          v2ar        Very old (0177555) archive (.a) from Second Edition UNIX
          v3ar        Very old (0177555) archive (.a) from Third Edition UNIX
          ar          Current (!<arch>\n), old (0177545), or very old (0177555)                      archive (.a); use (v1|v2|v3)ar for UNIX V1/V2/V3 archives         bcpio       Binary cpio archive (old); may be byte-swapped         cpio_odc    ASCII (odc) cpio archive         cpio_newc   New ASCII (newc) cpio archive         cpio_newcrc New ASCII (newc) cpio archive with checksum         tar       ustar, pre-POSIX ustar, or V7 tar archive         v1          First Edition UNIX file system         v2          Second Edition UNIX file system         v3          Third Edition UNIX file system         v4          Fourth Edition UNIX file system         v5          Fifth Edition UNIX file system         v6          Sixth Edition UNIX file system         v7          Seventh Edition UNIX file system         v10         Tenth Edition UNIX file system         32v         UNIX/32V file system         bsd         BSD file system (V7-style with fixed-length file names;                      e.g. 2.9BSD or 4.0BSD)         bsd-vn      BSD file system (pre 'fast-file-system' "UFS" with                     variable-length file names; e.g. 2.11BSD for PDP-11)

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