Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!fwi.uva.nl!croes From: croes@fwi.uva.nl (Felix A. Croes) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: minix ST 1.5 patch 3 Message-ID: <1370@carol.fwi.uva.nl> Date: 13 Oct 90 19:09:18 GMT References: <1320@carol.fwi.uva.nl> <1990Oct13.120111.21252@math.lsa.umich.edu> Sender: news@fwi.uva.nl Lines: 47 hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) writes: >In article <1320@carol.fwi.uva.nl> croes@fwi.uva.nl (Felix A. Croes) writes: [...] >> Why not use a separate (minor) device type for each disk format? That is the >>tidy way of doing things, no patches to the fs are required and the cdiff to >>stfloppy.c is so small it's almost trivial. >This implies that you know in advance all the different formats you will >encounter. In reality, ST disk drives are not all like (obviously!), some >will successfully format out to 85 tracks most only out to 82 or so. Some >can reliably use 11 sectors per track, most won't. This change allows you >to use properly formatted disks (by some clever TOS program, I guess) and >not have to worry what format it is and which device name/minor dev number >to reference. But sometimes I WANT to worry about the disk type I am using. Being able to use tar on high capacity disks is just so extremely useful... >It also allows using high density floppy disks, again, without having to >expand table entries in the fs for new device number assignments. I don't >think having to recompile the FS every time I want to read a different >disk is very tidy at all. Uh, where exactly does the fs depend on the number of minor devices? I thought the fs used them only for purposes of communication with the I/O tasks - not for indexing in any tables. >Just as a point of reference, the standard format is a 720K disk of 80 tracks >and 9 sectors per track. I routinely use 10 sectors per track and 82 tracks. >That's standard for me, but not so standard that I'm going to hardcode those >numbers into the device driver. The hardware is flexible, why shouldn't the >software be as well? You mean I cannot use my 800K tar file disks with the new patches because they are so *flexible* (the patches, not the disks)? As for standards, there may be a lot of them but a single user typically uses only one. I use 10 sectors per track and 80 tracks (my poor old disk drive just cannot handle any more). This is probably the minimum for all disk drive types. I am not really against this "flexible" drive type, even though I will never use it. But to be able to access the whole of a disk, I need multiple devices. -- Felix Croes (croes@fwi.uva.nl)