Is it possible that the floppy driver in 1.2.11 and 1.3.x can kill a machine
if low on memory, I've had several reports of
tar cvf /dev/fd0 *
Killing two machines here, they leave nothing in the log and don't repond to
the net. The machines only have 8MB and use a lot of NFS so they are reporting
lots of can't get free page errors in normal use. It would seem to me that
something in the floppy driver doesn't check for failure of kmalloc() although
I can't see what.
A slightly less important floppy error is that the /dev/fd0H1440 device d
I assume all the fixed format devices doesn't update the write protect status
on diskette change, if you try
tar cvfM /dev/fd0H1440 on a write protected diskette then the write protect
error will continue even after changing the diskette, only a read on /dev/fd0
will convince the kernel that you have removed the write protect.
Jon.