This thread began on -STABLE; I am moving it to -CURRENT and have
crossposted. Please, followups to -CURRENT.
On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, Jonathan Michaels wrote:
>> actually see bad blocks your disk is about to die. IIRC, the code was
>> suffering from bitrot and the drives that really needed it will (ESDI
>> and MFM mostly) aren't supported in 5.0.
>
>and what of all the people who still use this kind of hardware ?
I hate to have to ride on the heels of this scathing piece of criticism,
but I'm confident that the other members of the lists will probably eat
this guy alive. With that I leave Mr. Michaels to defend himself and
move on with a new thread.
The removal of kernel support for so-called winchester devices from
HEAD is a bit of a perplexing issue for me. On the one hand I
understand the multifold advantages of the new ata driver and appreciate
it enormously. However, FreeBSD just went ahead with its first release
to include support for the MCA bus. The vast majority of MCA bus
machines in existence utilize ESDI because they predate the UDMA and
ATA66 efforts. If we are to support MCA, how can we drop support for
ESDI? I know that the wd driver duplicates a significant amount of the
funtionality now present in ata and that having both of them in the
kernel would be of questionable value to most users. Surely there must
be some middle ground which would include support for ESDI, MFM, RLL,
and XT hardcards in a seperate driver, without duplicating the
functionality of ata and creating code bloat. I am not familiar with
the wd driver as it stands now or if the above is possible, but I would like
some feedback on just what issues currently surround the atticizing of
wd without replacing its functionality.
Brandon D. Valentine
--
"...and as for hackers, we note that all of those known to
The Register are so strapped financially that seizing their
property would be tantamount to squeezing blood from a stone."
-- The Register, 02/17/2000
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