From owner-freebsd-current Sun Apr 7 18:28:37 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id SAA17088 for current-outgoing; Sun, 7 Apr 1996 18:28:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id SAA17073 for ; Sun, 7 Apr 1996 18:28:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sax.sax.de by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id DAA12559 for ; Mon, 8 Apr 1996 03:28:25 +0200 Received: by sax.sax.de (8.6.11/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id DAA10007 for freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org; Mon, 8 Apr 1996 03:28:24 +0200 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.7.5/8.6.9) id CAA01573 for freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org; Mon, 8 Apr 1996 02:42:21 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199604080042.CAA01573@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: devfs questions To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD-current users) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 02:42:21 +0200 (MET DST) Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: <199604072041.NAA00546@phaeton.artisoft.com> from "Terry Lambert" at Apr 7, 96 01:41:01 pm X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8a] 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 As Terry Lambert wrote: > The naming convention is being imposed because you are restricting > the subdevice domain to 26 entries (a..z), and that's what is bad, > not the fact that naming is necessary or desirable. It will perhaps have to be even more restricted. Bruce suggests two densities (`standard', and `alternate'). Realistically, we have about 8 or so by now. So my `a' ... `z' was an overstatement, but Bruce convinced me that the name clash with partition letters is inconsitent. > > All i want is generic names, and leave it to userland to find > > convenient names for it. Format autodetection will never work for all > > 5E+23 different floppy formats that are available in the world. > > Microsoft can, therefore any reasonably intelligent 12 year old can. MS-DOS has a hard time reading my 5*1024*80*2 CP/M floppies, and it doesn't get it at all (even not with an additional driver) if the first four track of such a floppy are 26*128 FM formatted, since the BIOS insists on being able to read the very first sector. Further, if somebody has to handle 200 floppies of the (5E+23 - 1)th format in the list, he will be more than happy to have an `alternate density device' to shortcut the kernel decision. The same is true for unformatted media, since the driver will also have to do a long walk through its builtin format list before it will finally give up and declare the medium as unformatted. I've did format autodetection, though in my CP/M driver. :-) I've seen better autodetection in another CP/M driver, and i've seen many worse examples later. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)