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Subject: Re: NetBSD supports LBA and large (EIDE) drives
To: dyson@Root.COM (John Dyson)
Date: Wed, 3 May 95 17:08:33 MET DST
Cc: mycroft@ai.mit.edu, sos@FreeBSD.org, paul@isl.cf.ac.uk, phk@ref.tfs.com,
        terry@cs.weber.edu, hackers@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199505031500.IAA00574@Root.COM>; from "John Dyson" at May 3, 95 8:00 am
From: sos@FreeBSD.org
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In reply to John Dyson who wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> >    Don't bother, I did, they have what you could call "very rudimentary
> >    LBA support", in the commercial sense of the wording...
> > 
> > That's an interesting assertion, considering the driver does exactly
> > what the standard allows it to do -- namely, use logical block
> > numbers.
> > 
> > 
> It would have been more correct to say:
> 
> Don't bother, I did, they have what you could call "very rudimentary
> *EIDE* support", in the commercial sense of the wording...

:-)

> But, our current IDE driver is very rudimetary in the *EIDE* area too.  When
> I made the last set of changes to wd.c, I just did not think that LBA was that
> necessary, considering the TRUE EIDE support coming.  The Multi-block
> and the 32Bit access (done by another contributor) can both make
> significant performance improvements.  Maybe I should have added
> the 20 or so lines to get LBA support?????  My goal was to
> keep from breaking the driver, while getting the desired performance
> improvements.

Hmm, you get absolutely NO performance improvement out of using
LBA instead of CHS addressing, its simply just another way of
communicating the same info. And you can support big drives
using CHS as well as LBA, just the FDISK/BIOS/DISK problems are
hmm "different"...

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Soren Schmidt  (sos@FreeBSD.org | sos@login.dknet.dk)  FreeBSD Core Team
               So much code to hack -- so little time