From owner-freebsd-current  Mon Dec 13 22: 1:18 1999
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Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 01:01:21 -0500
To: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au>, Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
From: Greg Childers <gchil0@pop.uky.edu>
Subject: Re: HEADSUP: wd driver will be retired! 
Cc: Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG>,
	Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <19991213234037.36B341CA0@overcee.netplex.com.au>
References: <Message from Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
 <19991211130339.N760@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com>
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At 07:40 AM 12/14/99 +0800, Peter Wemm wrote:
>Greg Lehey wrote:
> > On Friday, 10 December 1999 at 23:32:27 -0800, Mike Smith wrote:
> > > [missing attribution to Greg Childers <gchil0@pop.uky.edu>]
> > >> Except that ATA currently does not work on my system.  So I assume I'm not
> > >> the only one.
> > >
> > > Actually, to quote from your original message:
> > >
> > >> According to technical product summary, the primary IDE interface, on
> > >> which both my drives reside, is a PCTech RZ1000 on the PCI local bus.
> > >

>The RZ1000 is *dangerous*!  We are doing no favours by making it run.. :-/
>IMHO It is better to loose the user by not playing ball than to corrupt
>their data or run unreliably and make them hate us for it.
>
>http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pc-hardware-faq/enhanced-IDE/part1/
<snip>
>   o  The PC-Tech RZ-1000, used on AT&T, Dell, Gateway and Intel boards,
>      also has two data-corrupting bugs. See also
>      <http://www.intel.com/procs/support/rz1000/index.htm>.
>
>   In both cases, the corruption occurs only in specific software
>   environments and is very subtle; you can go on working for months
>   without suspecting anything more than buggy software. The damage can
>   be immense. For all the details, look at Roedy Green's (roedy@bix.com)
>   "PCI EIDE controller flaws" FAQ included with his EIDE test
>   <ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/diskutil/eidete19.zip> program which will
>   test your system for the bugs.

Thanks for the info!  I wasn't aware of this problem.  Fortunately, the fix was easy.  
 From eideflaw.txt in the above mentioned utility (actually it's eidete20.zip now):

         Some BIOSes have a feature disable the EIDE prefetch buffer. <snip> This will 
         bypass both RZ-1000 flaws...

I haven't tried ATA after today's update.  I'll do that tomorrow.

Greg




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