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Date:      Wed, 1 Nov 1995 12:07:59 +1030 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert)
Cc:        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, terry@lambert.org, lenzi@cwbone.bsi.com.br, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: boot disk....
Message-ID:  <199511010138.MAA05178@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <199510311932.MAA10356@phaeton.artisoft.com> from "Terry Lambert" at Oct 31, 95 12:32:35 pm

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Terry Lambert stands accused of saying:
> 
> > Terry Lambert stands accused of saying:
> > > Why?  We don't *have* to insist that we be able to boot from an 'a' slice
> > > after 1024, do we?  That's a requirement you've tacked on.
> > 
> > It's becoming a very common requirement 8(  
> 
> It's one that DOS and Win95 don't meet.  That's 80% or more of Intel class
> machines right there -- doesn't seem very common.

You miss my point.  Joe Luser wants FreeBSD on his w95 machine.  Us nice
people talk him into using fips to shrink his 1.6GB FAT filesystem (stop
puking Terry 8) down to "as small as possible".

He comes back and complains that he can't boot. 

After a week of confusing replies we discover that because he has seperate
copies of every version of Doom ever released, and more than two 
Microsoft products, "as small as possible" is still >1024 cylinders.

We should be able to work in this situation; the fact that it's almost
impossible notwithstanding.

In fact, it's not impossible, it's just that we would have to play so
far outside the rules that we'd stand a good chance of screwing everything
up 8(

> Media perfection impact write ordering algorithms.  As such, it must be
> visible to the upper layer I/O subsystem, even if it is infact implemented
> in hardware.

I think that the nightmare that would be involved in attempting to outthink
a modern SCSI drive's behaviour in the presence of forwarded sectors would
cost more than it would save.

In the case of an IDE disk, where requests are handled in-order, your
point is well taken.

> 					Terry Lambert

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
]] High-speed data acquisition and                                      [[
]] realtime instrument control          (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039         [[
]] My car has "demand start" -Terry Lambert  UNIX: live FreeBSD or die! [[



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