On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 10:15:18AM +0100, Stephen Borrill wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Richard Rauch wrote:
> > Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2003/10/15/0000.html
 [...]
> > However, after about 5 tries, it seems to give up reporting a "hard error".
 [...]
> Yes, it does give up eventually, but it's not a quick response.

Even with amd?  I misunderstood you, then, when you spoke of perpetual
errors.  (Bear in mind that I don't use amd.  (^&)


> [from private mail]
> > I don't know if this will do what you want, but in ..src/sys/dev/isa/fd.c
> > there are two functions (fdcresult() and out_fdc()) that each will
> > repeat their attempted commands 100000 times.
> [snip]
> > If you change the 100000 numbers to something smaller, that might at
> > least make it more bearable for people who manually try to mount an
> > empty drive.
> 
> It's certainly a good theory. With 100000 "date; ls /mnt/floppy; date"
> takes 38 seconds. When set to 100, the timeouts come slightly quicker and

Well, that's interesting news.  (^&

I don't really know that cutting the retry count is wise in general, since
I just skimmed the source, but 100000 does seem excessive.

Did you cut both of the counts, or just the one?  Since one of them
doesn't have any associated log message, you might be running into
both.


> the commands above take 25 seconds. It's still a hell of long time to
> determine whether the floppy is empty or not, but it is an improvement.

With that, I definitely agree.


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/