From owner-freebsd-current Wed Apr 10 14:10:55 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id OAA09586 for current-outgoing; Wed, 10 Apr 1996 14:10:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA09576 for ; Wed, 10 Apr 1996 14:10:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id OAA02399; Wed, 10 Apr 1996 14:08:45 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199604102108.OAA02399@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: floppy format detection [was Re: devfs questions] To: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 14:08:45 -0700 (MST) Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <199604101125.NAA13069@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Apr 10, 96 01:25:06 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > > But only for the first two drives. :-) > > > > I really do not see the problem with time penalizing people for old > > hardware. > > It's not a question of penalizing, it's a matter of not excluding them > from the game. I want it to work. It's will just happen to be slow doing the automatic detect in the old/broken hardware case. Slow, not prevented from. > > I can stuff a floppy in a drive on a DOS box, do a "dir" and have it > > list the floppy contents *regardless* of the format. > > Unless it's formatted with 1 KB sectors. :) Then it's not a floppy with a supported FS type on it and I can ignore it. If I have supported FS types that can use that media, then I need to autodetect. No matter how long it takes to do so. I'd put that at the end of the searchlist, sice I'd have to assign a very low probability to that particular format. 8-). > > And you guys are saying FreeBSD can never do this thing that DOS does > > because it needs to have the device identified for a manual mount > > instead of a mount as a result of automatic device identification. > > I didn't say FreeBSD could never do this. Good. We agree. 8-). > > For comparison, see the SCSI floppy drives ... > > Those i've seen so far are *terribly* slow in mounting a new floppy. > During the time where a DG/UX machine with its SCSI-to-floppy bridge, > or an SGI Indy with its floptical were checking the format, you've > already copied an entire floppy in FreeBSD. > > I would hesitate to pick them as a good example of automagic format > detection. They aren't a good example. They are an example of it being possible in one of the worst cases you could arrange to actually happen. They are the old/broken hardware case. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.