On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 10:16:39AM -0400, Jason Thorpe wrote: > > > On May 31, 2026, at 10:10???AM, Jason Thorpe <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > >> On May 31, 2026, at 7:07???AM, Thor Lancelot Simon <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> The underlying hardware's often the same (CDC made the guts of plenty of > >> DEC drives), SMD drives internally have no facility for sparing out > >> sectors, > >> and I wonder whether Sun did in fact do it. However, I just Googled around > >> for SunOS 3 source code and I see no evidence of a bad144 utility, though > >> I did not dig through the kernel looking for driver support. > > > > SunOS 3 certainly had a flag for "use DEC std 144" in the dk_info structure > > (<sun/dkio.h>). > > ???and it certainly appears that the SunOS 3 ???xy??? driver uses it, > including with big-endian fields, heh.
Huh. I wonder how it got populated. I'm vaguely remembering they might have had a "format" utility or something. Means moving a drive physically from a DEC system to a Sun VME system would have lost the bad block table, right? I remember seeing exactly that done a few times with CDC drives that went from VAXen with Emulex controllers to Sun replacements which I expect had Xylogics controllers. I guess to do this safely must have required a low-level reformat by something that wrote the bad144 data in the expected byte order. -- Thor Lancelot Simon [email protected] "The liberties...lose much of their value whenever those who have greater private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course of public debate." -John Rawls
