Subject: Floppy questions

From: [email-masked] (Brad Pepers)

I have a working (read-only) floppy device now. It hasn't been
tested much but it seems to be working. It is based on some floppy
code I wrote a while ago and the i386 floppy code. I am looking
now to try some neat stuff with it like newfs/disklabel/... How
does everyone think disklabels should be done? I was thinking to
either make a fake one for the whole drive as one partition or
actually write out the label to sector 0.

How close is the AFFS to being released? Since I can't write to
the floppy I'm stuck right now as an AFFS disk.

Also what all do I need to do to work towards a bootable floppy
system?

And finally, as I don't understand the controller/slave setup
properly - the device driver is a bit odd. It is configured as:

device		fp0	at manafacturer 1	product 10

I used fp instead of fd since there is already an fd device. I
added the builtin product #10 for my device.

Hopefully when I release this someone who understands netbsd
better can clean things up a bit...

+----------------------------Ren & Stimpy--------------------------------+
| "Psst. Hey Guido. It's all so clear to me now. I'm the keeper of the   |
| cheese. And you're the lemon merchant. Get it? And he knows it. That's |
| why he's gonna kill us. So we gotta beat it. Yeah. Before he lets      |
| loose the marmosets on us! Don't worry, little missy! I'll save you!"  |
+------------------ Brad Pepers -- [email-masked] -------------------+

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From: [email-masked] (Niklas Hallqvist)

>>>>> "Brad" == Brad Pepers <[email-masked]> writes:

Brad> How close is the AFFS to being released? Since I can't write to
Brad> the floppy I'm stuck right now as an AFFS disk.

It was and is very close...  In fact I had reserved time off from my
family the recent weekend for this, but then my kernel started to give
me problems and I spent time on that instead.  I think I'll do two
releases, one for those of you that *really* want it bad, can compile
your own kernel and resolve patch conflicts yourself, and one *real* LKM
binary+source release sometime later.  The former I'll try to get out
tonight, I really feel bad about the delay, I do apologize...

Niklas

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From: [email-masked] (Ty Sarna)

> actually write out the label to sector 0.

I would just fake up a disklabel for the whole disk. I don't think it
makes sense to partition a floppy.

> added the builtin product #10 for my device.

Pruduct #2 was already reserved for floppies. The commented-out entry
in the original config files was:

#master		floppy0 at manufacturer 1	product 2

I don't knowthat a master/slaves design is strictly needed, but it could
be useful for supporting multiple disk formats (eg amiga-style 880K,
dos-style 720K MFM, etc).

-- 
Ty Sarna                 "As you know, Joel, children have always looked
[email-masked]        up to cowboys as role models. And vice versa."