Re: Floppy Handling

From: ferret@phonewave.net
Date: Wed Jun 14 2000 - 18:18:33 EST


On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Jacques Richer wrote:

>
>
> "Kenneth C. Arnold" wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Jun 14, 2000 at 04:49:33PM -0400, Jacques Richer wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > Not sure I like that, TBH. We shouldn't go filling up the user's disk with
> > > > caches unless we really need to - I'd much rather use the free swap space
> > > > for this.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Your approach seems better to me for floppies, I agree. Unfortunately, if you extend
> > > this to CDROM (650mb...) you can easily blow up the machine by running out of VM.
> > > Many of the machines I run here do not have more than 500mb or so of swap space, and
> > > use very little of that...
> >
> > Yes, but:
> >
> > 1. CDs aren't writable, and
> > 2. even for the writable ones (which require special s/w anyway), there is
> > an eject lock.
> >
> > So why bother caching this? I do see your point, though -- the ~120 MB floppy
> > (forget the name) _would_ have problems. But drives with eject lock, e.g., ZIP,
> > have no problems without doing special kernel stuff.

Ls-120, which has an eject lock here. Only problem is a tendancy to
overheat when writing an entire 120MB disk. :/ I hear there's a version
which attaches to the FDC port, but I've never seen one. Mine's an ATAPI
internal model.

> > > I was thinking of hooks into the vfs layer to work with a user-space deamon. This
> > > way, we can put the necessary code into userland and if it's done carefully a crash
> > > of the userland daemod would be recoverable. This is just conceptual, as I am not
> > > terribly familiar with the vfs code.
> >
> > Wasn't there / isn't there a userfs? (??)
> >
> > Kenneth
>
> I did not see a userfs in the 2.2.16 tree I have here. If there is one in another version
> of the kernel - just let me know and I'll see how bad it'll be to cruft at least a basic
> test case together.
>
> --
> Jacques
> --
> The packet goes out the card, into the copper,
> out the router, onto the fiber, across the world,
> through the copper......
> NOTHING BUT NET!
>
>
>
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