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From: evans@ditsyda.oz (Bruce Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Large Disks
Message-ID: <2253@ditsyda.oz>
Date: 9 Oct 89 06:52:07 GMT
References: <241@vsserv.scri.fsu.edu> <3491@ast.cs.vu.nl> <2988@ndsuvax.UUCP> <3541@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: evans@ditsyda.oz (Bruce Evans)
Organization: CSIRO DIT Sydney, Australia
Lines: 14

In article <3541@ast.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>Ioctl really isn't for disks.  It would be best if the driver could figure
>out the geometry itself.  I thought it made some BIOS call for this, but

The driver has its own problems deciding the geometry (it uses magic :-)),
but the original suggestion was for user-level ioctls so programs like
fdisk could find the number of heads instead of using the same or different
magic. The original ioctl interface is barely adequate for TTY, let alone
disks, and would require masses of code in the library for all the POSIX
ioctls, so is not worth keeping.

Bruce
-- 
Bruce Evans		evans@ditsyda.oz.au