Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 13 Sep 1997 22:07:10 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey)
Cc:        joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Do *you* have problems with floppies?
Message-ID:  <199709132207.PAA29890@usr03.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <19970913165635.17336@lemis.com> from "Greg Lehey" at Sep 13, 97 04:56:35 pm

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > An FDC-reported ``CRC error in data field'' is just what the FDC is
> > telling me.  I don't see why you're blaming the driver for being
> > blind-eyed if it just believes what the FDC is telling.
> 
> It looks like it, doesn't it?  But how does that explain why people
> can read some things on one machine when it's running Linux, and not
> on the same machine when it's running FreeBSD?  Remember that floppies
> contain a lot of analogue electronics (well, a large proportion of the
> electronics are analogue :-).  And we all know that floppy drives are
> a piece of shit.  I think that any driver that believes the drive is
> being blind-eyed.  JOOI, how many times do you retry?

It is not an issue of retrying forever; typical BIOS implementations
will seek and retry.
 
I think the problem lies in the use of sector instead of track based
reads and writes, actually.  Doing a sector at a time can add a lot
of slop-error.  To keep multitrack writes streaming would require
two track buffers, BTW.

The track buffer would act as a cache.  Inter-track seeking would
be a bit slowed by this, but the MSDOSFS should probably see a good
performance improvement, especially since locality dictates that
most of the interesting pieces of the FAT will be in one buffer
or the other.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199709132207.PAA29890>