Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 02:42:21 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD-current users) Subject: Re: devfs questions Message-ID: <199604080042.CAA01573@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199604072041.NAA00546@phaeton.artisoft.com> from "Terry Lambert" at Apr 7, 96 01:41:01 pm
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As Terry Lambert wrote: > The naming convention is being imposed because you are restricting > the subdevice domain to 26 entries (a..z), and that's what is bad, > not the fact that naming is necessary or desirable. It will perhaps have to be even more restricted. Bruce suggests two densities (`standard', and `alternate'). Realistically, we have about 8 or so by now. So my `a' ... `z' was an overstatement, but Bruce convinced me that the name clash with partition letters is inconsitent. > > All i want is generic names, and leave it to userland to find > > convenient names for it. Format autodetection will never work for all > > 5E+23 different floppy formats that are available in the world. > > Microsoft can, therefore any reasonably intelligent 12 year old can. MS-DOS has a hard time reading my 5*1024*80*2 CP/M floppies, and it doesn't get it at all (even not with an additional driver) if the first four track of such a floppy are 26*128 FM formatted, since the BIOS insists on being able to read the very first sector. Further, if somebody has to handle 200 floppies of the (5E+23 - 1)th format in the list, he will be more than happy to have an `alternate density device' to shortcut the kernel decision. The same is true for unformatted media, since the driver will also have to do a long walk through its builtin format list before it will finally give up and declare the medium as unformatted. I've did format autodetection, though in my CP/M driver. :-) I've seen better autodetection in another CP/M driver, and i've seen many worse examples later. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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