On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 03:24:59PM +0000, Charles M. Hannum wrote:
> This is a relatively new "feature," which I am likely to remove soon, because 
> it causes exactly the problem you mentioned.  (It also had another serious 
> bug that I fixed a few days ago -- it caused I/O to *other* blocks to return 
> EIO.)

Note that I'm not the one who implemented this.
The fact that it prevent writes is not a feature, it's a bug in the way
it's implemented (the test for read is misplaced).

I don't remember the exact details that caused this to be implemented; you
should probably ask the author.

> 
> Also, I recently (a few days ago) eliminated the downgrading of transfer modes 
> on most errors -- it's pointless, and there's also no way to recover from 
> that without rebooting.

I've seen on many occasions, with different hardware, that downgrading
would cause the errors to dissapear (even "ID not found" or "uncorrectable
data error" types of errors). I agree the hardware was flacky,
but downgrading at last allowed the install to complete.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--