Hi David.
>>> AmigaOS just polled the line to detect insertions and removals.
>> Wonderful. And how frequent the polling was?
>>> it would mount as another logical volume. Now when there was a
>>> need to access the first floppy, the OS popped up a dialog ( a
>>> requester, in amiga terminology :-) saying "Insert volume
>>> Linux_help_disk into any drive". When the user
>> Ahem... OK, does anyone else see something strange in words "OS
>> popped up a dialog"?
> No.
> On a real operating system, the OS would simply notify userland,
> which would do whatever it wanted to do.
Fair enough so far. It's from here on that things go wrong.
> A sensible userland might then spit out a dialog telling the
> user...
Which user's screen should that dialogue appear on? Remember, the
process most likely to access floppies is the one that flushes dirty
buffers to disk - `updated` if my memory's correct - and it's unlikely
it will have any clue here.
Remember: On a multi-user system like Linux, the user that removed the
floppy could easily NOT be the user that was writing to it.
> ...to put the disk in question back into the machine, or it
> might ignore the frantic request from the kernel, at which point
> the OS would return EYOULOSE to the poor process that tried to
> access the no longer existing process.
Same question: WHich user should be notified?
> Think about kerneld/kmod/whatever it is this week.
They have one BIG advantage over the facility under discussion: They
do NOT need to interact with any user to do their work.
Best wishes from Riley.
* Copyright (C) 1999, Memory Alpha Systems.
* All rights and wrongs reserved.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| There is something frustrating about the quality and speed of Linux |
| development, ie., the quality is too high and the speed is too high, |
| in other words, I can implement this XXXX feature, but I bet someone |
| else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* http://www.memalpha.cx/Linux/Kernel/
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