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To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: atapi errors 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 05 Nov 1996 16:16:51 +1030."
             <199611050546.QAA22535@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> 
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 1996 23:48:59 -0800
Message-ID: <14743.847180139@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> It's been pretty clearly established that the FBSD atapi driver isn't
> the hottest.  Nobody much here takes ATAPI CDroms seriously, for what
> seem to us to be good reasons.  If you do, or you can help motivate
> someone else, then consider it in your interest to do so.

Actually, even those of us who take it very seriously, as Walnut Creek
CDROM does, are somewhat handicapped by still not really knowing what
the heck to do about it. :-( I'm no kernel hacker, dipping into that
area of the system only very occasionally, and yet WC has no one else
on tap to deal with this.  Soren and others have kindly volunteered to
try and do *something* about it, but they're so overloaded already
that this doesn't necessarily guarantee any forward progress.

We need an ATAPI god to come along and pick this up more than anything
else, and any failure to do so really doesn't have a lot to do with
hardware elitism at all - these people are simply rare and we just
haven't found one yet.

This also hasn't been helped by the fact that a local company
volunteered to provide hardware then faded away.  I'm about to the
point where I'm going to ask WC for about $2K to buy all the IDE
CDROMS I can find, using the rest as a slush fund to buy some sort of
perk that an ATAPI hacker would appreciate.  Maybe a Thai bride? :-)

					Jordan