Date: 06 Apr 1998 03:21:06 +0200 From: dag-erli@ifi.uio.no (Dag-Erling Coidan =?iso-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?= ) To: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> Cc: Niklas Saers <berenmls@saers.com>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: MSDOSFS Message-ID: <xzpk993wxrx.fsf@hrotti.ifi.uio.no> In-Reply-To: "Daniel O'Connor"'s message of "Mon, 06 Apr 1998 10:42:01 %2B0930" References: <199804060112.KAA08540@cain.gsoft.com.au>
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"Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> writes: > > > unavaible as the floppy. Why does the entire filesystem go down with one > > > minor problem such as the floppy? And how can I avoid this. (except from > > > using bad floppies, that is :) ) > > Don't mount floppies, use mtools instead. > Hmm.. I don't think thats really an nice solution.. > The whole point of the FS is that it abstracts file access so that you don't > need different programs to access different types of drive. (ie I don't need > tar which works with MFS, FFS, and NFS, because the FS abstracts access to > files..) > Perhaps MSDOSFS needs the 'soft' option a la NFS =) There are just too many gotchas with PC floppy drives to make them safe to mount, IMHO. They're cheap lowest-common-denominator¹ hardware. You have no assurance that the user doesn't actually switch floppies between mount and umount, because you have no way to lock the media and disk change sense doesn't work reliably. Floppy operations should be done atomically, as mtools does, rather than on a session basis as mount does. Besides, its capacity and speed are so low and its use is so restricted that having to mount and umount it all the time is a pain in the butt. Hopefully the LS120 brings a solution to this; LS120 drives elctromechanical (rather than plain mechanical) media ejection and allow media locking, and their capacity is such that it actually makes sense to mount a disk for a certain period of time. ¹ Yeah, I know it's supposed to be greatest common denominator... -- fprintf(stderr, "I have a closed mind. It helps keeping the rain out.\n"); To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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