In article <200201100129.g0A1TPV00491@silver.cnet.aladdin.de>,
Christian Groessler <cpg@aladdin.de> wrote:

Why don't you send-pr it. Yes it would be nice to add the additional
functionality, but I don't have the time to look at it right now.

christos


>Hi,
>
>our fdformat(1) programm is very flexible in supporting non-standard
>diskette layouts. One can specify all relevant parameters describing a
>diskette format (except FM - MFM, but FM anyway won't work on 99% of
>the systems).
>
>But there is no way to access a non-conforming diskette layout, there
>are only some formats available, which are PC (DOS) specific (see
>fdc(4)).
>
>I had the need to access some other format, so I did some changes to
>support those formats (which are available when formatting the disk)
>also later when accessing the disk.
>
>I created a fdparm utility (derived from the fdformat(1) utility)
>which can be used to set the diskette parameters.
>
>Then I modified the fd.c driver (sys/dev/isa/fd.c) to provide a
>"persistent device".  The old fd.c driver allowed all the changes
>in parameters which fdformat provides, but after closing the device
>all changes were gone. This did not appear very useful to me. My
>"persistent device" remembers the changes to the configuration until
>it's changed again.
>
>This way the fdparm tool can set the configuration and then disks of
>this layout can used very easily.
>
>I used the "h" device (e.g. /dev/fd0h) to be the persistent device,
>maybe this is not wanted and the # of minor devices should be upped
>from 8 to 16 for the floppy devices? Is this feasable? Then there
>would be room for some other default layouts (see fdc(4)) and we
>could use 2 or more "persistent" settable layouts.
>
>Anyway, my changes are on
>ftp://ftp.groessler.org/pub/chris/fdparm  or
>ftp://ftp.aladdin.de/pub/people/chris/fdparm ...
>
>Is there a chance that this can get integrated?
>
>regards,
>chris
>