Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 27 Nov 2001 12:45:05 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 27 Nov 2001 12:44:58 -0500 Received: from mail.libertysurf.net ([213.36.80.91]:40226 "EHLO mail.libertysurf.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 27 Nov 2001 12:44:46 -0500 Message-ID: <3C03D197.7050605@paulbristow.net> Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 18:47:03 +0100 From: Paul Bristow User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010914 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Borsenkow Andrej CC: Richard Gooch , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: ide-floppy.c vs devfs In-Reply-To: <000601c1773f$d80d9ba0$21c9ca95@mow.siemens.ru> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Borsenkow Andrej wrote: >>This is made somewhat more complicated by the fact that ide-floppy >> > disks > >>can use either the whole disk, with no partition table or, more >>commonly, partition4. So a user-friendly solution would be to create >> > a > >>floppy node that pointed to the partition, if it existed, or the whole >>disk if it didn't. With appropriate code to handle that fact that >>anyone can partition these disks in any way they like. >> >> > > Where's the problem? Use .../disc for whole disc or .../part4 for > "normal" access. (Or /dev/hdc and /dev/hdc4 if you prefer) It is nice if > partition code can detect it but it is not ide-floppy driver problem. Just wondering if we should be clever for the users here. Maybe I should leave that to user-space tools? Or is there anything in devfs that can take care of this? The nice solution for end-users might be a /dev/idefloppy that is a symlink to the relevant node in the /dev/ide... tree. >>Note this doesn't take account of the nice ATAPI command that sets the >>disk into "ignore track 0" mode, making a partition 4 look like an >>entire floppy with 1 less track. >> >> > > Why complicate things more than needed? Because you can boot from a zip or ls-120 drive, with the BIOS setting it to this mode. There are disks out there that are unreadable unless you ignore track zero, by formatting them in a PC like this. >>Anyone up to telling me how this is handled in the SCSI layer? >> >> > > When I boot without media in Jaz drive I get something like "no media > inserted, assuming 1GB 512B per sector". Actually I modeled my patch > from this - use some default values reported by drive when no media > currently exists. OK. This makes the most sense here. I'm happy to go with this. I'll dig out your patch - discovered I was on holiday when you originally submitted it - and code and test something over the next day or so. Thanks for the help > -andrej -- Paul Email: paul@paulbristow.net Web: http://paulbristow.net ICQ: 11965223 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/