Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 08:42:13 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Joerg Wunsch <joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de> Cc: FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Do *you* have problems with floppies? Message-ID: <19970913084213.18186@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <19970912154815.HN39525@uriah.heep.sax.de>; from J Wunsch on Fri, Sep 12, 1997 at 03:48:15PM %2B0200 References: <19970912101014.37786@lemis.com> <19970912154815.HN39525@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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On Fri, Sep 12, 1997 at 03:48:15PM +0200, J Wunsch wrote: > As Greg Lehey wrote: > >> I've seen a lot of reports recently about problems with floppies under >> FreeBSD. Now I can understand a lot of that: floppies must be the >> most unreliable data storage medium I can think of, not to mention the >> most expensive per byte. But I'm getting the feeling that there is >> more to it than that, that possibly there's a bug in the floppy driver >> and that we're blaming it on the inherent unreliability of the medium. > > Oh, Greg is going to take over maintenance of the FDC driver! > Congratulations! :-) Look carefully. I'm just gathering information: >> I'm looking for indications which would point towards the driver. One >> of these might be: >> >> 1. Floppy formatted under <insert your OS here> on the same machine. >> 2. FreeBSD runs into hardware problems with the floppy (typically >> things like checksum errors). >> 3. <insert your OS here> can read the entire floppy with no trouble. > > There's exactly one unexplained record open where 1 - 3 does fit, and > i have yet to see more user input data for this case (or have to get > the drive and floppy controller myself for debugging). There are more now. > Greg, please think a little more about reported problems before > starting this kind of postings. What has been triggering this was > plainly and clearly something where a user had a problem with *the > BIOS* reading the floppy. This should say enough about the media > quality... Now there's the misassumption. I've already mentioned medium quality and the general unreliability. Ignoring that, it still seems that there are a significant number of cases where other systems can read the floppy, and FreeBSD can't. I've had them myself, though not on my current hardware. >> In addition, if you have any other evidence I haven't thought of which >> would also point to an error in the floppy driver, please contact me. > > Good luck for fixing these errors... Does this mean you don't want to maintain the driver any more? > And don't forget to verify your changes on at least half a dozen of > drives and controllers. That's one of the reasons I want to get a larger populace involved. Obviously you (or I) can't test all hardware. We need the people who have reported the problems to help. Unfortunately, so far the evidence isn't as exact as I would have liked. I know that this is a pain. Nobody says it isn't. But it doesn't help to turn a blind eye to possible driver problems and blame them on the medium. Note that I haven't claimed there *is* a problem with the driver yet--I'm just trying to get some evidence before going to look for a problem that doesn't exist. Greg
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