Dean> It happens with IDE disks under sparc linux in rescue mode. I've got a sparc linux box running Ubuntu 7.04 (hopeing to upgrade to 8.x without problems...) and this is strange news to me. Can you give me more details on your setup? In general, this is more of a kernel version and kernel drivers issue, than anything else.
Dean> I agree, its annoying. I think the Linux kernel seems to be Dean> going in the wrong direction... Basically, the original IDE drivers would have needed *major* surgery to work with the new SATA controllers and drives. SATA supports a large subset (possibly superset, my knowledge is hazt) of the core SCSI commands and capabilities. The original IDE drivers and drives are descended from the dumb as rocks MFM and RLL drives and controllers. Vendors learned alot with the IDE, EIDE, etc transitions and how painful they were. And how poorly those drives/controllers performmed. This became even *more* evident as Moore's Law showed how piss-poor those drives were, while SCSI drives just ratcheted up the BUS speed, but didn't have to change the commands, or logic all that much. Anyway. With the new SATA disks converging in abilities with SCSI, they decided to re-use alot of the SCSI mid-layer stuff, since it made sense to reuse code which was already working well and was well tested. As I said, I've proably got some details wrong, but the core is correct. Dean> I keep hoping OSF/1 will get opensourced like Motif and DCE. I've got a pristine box of Plan9 manuals and source on my shelf. Not sure why... but wouldn't that be a better course than OSF/1? Though I admit advfs would be a nice thing to have, if only to compare it to btrfs and ext4. Dean> I actually just spoke with TOG about it--said they'd ask the Dean> lawyers, so keep fingers crossed. But I'd probably also jump at Dean> a distribution with GNU commands and libs based on OpenSolaris Dean> kernel, but the CDDL doesn't quite allow repackaging...sigh. Doesn't OpenSolaris have a mostly GNU tool chain nowdays? Or can't you at least layer it on easily, even if only as an addon? John _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
