[Gllug] linux and floppy disks

[Bruce Richardson]

On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 03:17:23PM +0100, Chris Ball wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 11:50:43PM +0100, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> > IIRC, with 3 1/2 inch drives it is possible to poll the drive 
> 
> Undoubtedly. What do you mean by 'poll the drive', though?

I have no idea.  I just remember reading about it years ago, when the
technology first made its way into the PC.

> be done once every few seconds, and that amount of syscalling, dealing
> with interrupts, and entering/exiting kernel space every so often (not to
> mention the noise of the attempted read, which would probably be even
> more annoying!) isn't something I'd be easily convinced to do with my
> own systems..

No, it definitely didn't involve reading the disk, just a register on a
port.  More than that I couldn't say.  The Mac approach, where the
hardware has no doubt about what is happening to the disk, is much
superior and doesn't require all this faffing about with disklabels.

-- 
Bruce

Those who cast the votes decide nothing.  Those who count the
votes decide everything. -- Joseph Stalin
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