> From: "Matthias Pfaller" <leo@dachau.marco.de>
> Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 16:27:53 +0100 (MEZ)
> 
[...]
> It would be nice if one could pass an array containing the
> sectornumbers. That way it would be possible to do interleave,
> cylinder/head skew and to do some wierd formats like old OS9 (where
> sector numbers start with 0 and not with 1) or Amstrad CPC floppies (where
> sector numbers start at 0x01, 0x41 or 0xC1 depending on the filesystem
> type). Flags to select between FM/MFM and between ISO/IBM-34 format
> would be nice as well.
> 
> Matthias

That sort of flexibility is nice, however, I hope to see a fairly
general-purpose interface for floppy disk parameter control; i.e.
one that does not presume much knowledge about the capabilities
of the particular hardware.  Asking this interface to allow those
strange sector numbering schemes looks pretty low-level to me.

I might suggest instead that strange formats like that might be
supported by a different ioctl that makes no attempt to hide the
attributes of the actual hardware (i.e. NEC 765 or Intel 82072)
and gives you pretty much raw access to that hardware.

Gordon