Editing Amiga Fast File System (section)

==History==
{{Timeline of release years
| range1 = 1988 - 1989
| range1_color = #ff8a00 #0055ad <!-- Colours are those from Workbench v1.2–1.3 -->
| range2 = 1990 - 1991
| range2_color = #638abd #adaaad <!-- Colours are those from Workbench v2.04–2.1 -->
| range3 = 1991 - 1992
| range3_color = #228B22
| 1988 = v34 with AmigaOS v1.3
| 1990 = v37 with AmigaOS v2.0
| 1992 = v39 with AmigaOS v3.0
| 1993 = v40 with AmigaOS v3.1}}

FFS was introduced with version 1.3 of [[AmigaOS]]<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_13chg.txt | website=gregdonner.org| title=wb_13chg.txt | first=Gregory| last= Donner|access-date=Nov 12, 2012}}</ref> in 1988,<ref>1.3 release confirmed on September 16, 1988, by Carolyn Scheppner of CATS in amiga.dev in [[Byte Information Exchange|BIX]]. [http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.sys.amiga/msg/f8a849922796bc93 Copy of BIX announcement from USENET]</ref> and replaced both the Kickstart ROM (or Kickstart floppy for A1000s) and [[Workbench (AmigaOS)|Workbench]] floppy with updated software. It carried the version number of v34, like the rest of the AmigaOS 1.3 components.

Kickstart 1.3 provided autobooting support so that the machine could now be booted from hard disk or reset-proof RAM disk ("RAD:"), whereas earlier Kickstart releases could only be booted from floppy disk. Workbench 1.3 provided the FFS filesystem [[device driver]] on disk, which could be copied into the [[Amiga Rigid Disk Block|Rigid Disk Block (RDB)]] on hard disks. Compliant [[block device]]s would then load and install the filesystem driver before filesystems were mounted and thus make it possible to use loadable filesystems on hard disks. Kickstart 1.2 could boot Workbench 1.3 from floppy (and vice versa), but it needed both Kickstart and Workbench 1.3 to autoboot FFS-formatted hard disks.

FFS support was merged into the ROM-based filesystem from Kickstart 2.0 onwards, and so it was no longer necessary to install FFS in the RDB. The ability to load filesystems from the RDB still remained available in case one wished to fix ROM bugs, get new FFS features, or use a third-party filesystem.

Floppies are unpartitioned devices without a RDB and also do not use the autobooting mechanism, so were only bootable if the disk's dostype was one the ROM-based filesystem understood. As a result, FFS-formatted floppies were not bootable until the release of Kickstart 2.0, and mounting them under Workbench 1.3 involved some ugly unsupported hacks. Similarly, "Directory Cache" variants were not bootable or supported until Kickstart 3.0.

The various FFS flavours did not have any compatibility problems with Amiga software, even ones that were considered "system-unfriendly". Software would either use the system calls and thus work with any filesystem, or be "trackloaders" and not use a filesystem at all.