Re: New features in NetBSD 1.2 ???

[Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios%cs.uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

>  Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 15:33:16 +0000 (+0100)
>  From: Ruben van Staveren <staveren%bromo.PTF.HRO.NL@localhost>

>  Can anyone tell me what the new features in NetBSD 1.2 are ?

Read the doc/CHANGES file in the source distribution for a complete set, or
the INSTALL file when the distribution is out.

>  e.g. are the diskquota's fixed ?

You should ask this on tech-user%netbsd.org@localhost, not port-amiga. 

[Personally, I'm not aware that they are broken at all; however, I
didn't yet try to use quota really hard.]


>  And how about new partion creating from within NetBSD/Amiga with disklabel
>  when will that be possible ?

Hah! Do I smell a volunteer? No? Oh... what a pity.  

Manipulating rdb through "disklabel", or with a utility of its own,
isn't _that_ difficult, but people can live without it, while they
can't live without driver support for their hardware... therefore its
a bit low on most people's priority lists.

[side note: However, I can savely promise that bootblocks will be part of
 NetBSD-1.3.]

   Blizzard 1230-IV SCSI support ?

No. 

   And finally why gives using a zipdrive me this at boottime ?

   bzsc0 targ 6 lun 0: <IOMEGA, ZIP 100, C.19> SCSI2 0/direct removable
   sd1 at scsibus1sd1(bzsc0:6:0): illegal request, data = 00 00 00 00 24 00 00 
00
   00 00 ff fe 01 02 76 00 00
   sd1: could not mode sense (4); using fictitious geometry
   : 96MB, 96 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 512 bytes/sec
   sd1(bzsc0:6:0): illegal request, data = 00 00 00 00 24 00 00 00 00 00 ff fe 
01
   02 76 00 00
   sd1: could not mode sense (4); using fictitious geometry

Just what it says:

It couldn't sense the mode page 4, because there is none on removable
disks. In the infinite wisdom of the ANSI standardazition committee
which defines SCSI, geometry information for removable disks is in
mode page 5 (presumably in a different format). NetBSD-1.3 will have
code to handle this. Until then, you'll have to live with the messages.

The messages themselves are not harmful (as cylinders sizes are not
REALLY needed by NetBSD other than as measures of unit.)

However, there is a special problem with NetBSD/Amiga: we use the
Amiga "RDSK" & "PART" structure on disks. Their units of measure for
partition sizes and positions are NOT disk blocks, but cylinders, so
we fail for anything besides the "c" (full-disk) partition.

I think a workaround is to use HDTOOLBOX to assign the 64/32 geometry
(which the kernel reports on startup) to the disk and save it. Yes,
this is an evil kludge.

Regards,
        Ignatios Souvatzis