On Thu, 21 Nov 1996, Daniel Blueman (5) (CURRICULUM) wrote:

> The kernel doesn't recognise the ATAFS on a RapIDE32 interface card in
> my
> RiscPC.
> 
> ATAFS is a Filecore compliant FS, so that it *should* work with the
> RiscBSD
> kernel (4626, I think), unless of course it uses the ADFS_DiscOp SWIs
> directly,
> but surely it would be much wiser to use the FileCore_DiscOp SWIs as
> they
> pass control to other FS's.

I'm afraid it isn't as simple as that. RiscBSD is an operating system in
itself, just like RISC OS, so it has its own code to access disks and
filesystems. I believe it dosen't use any RISC OS calls at all. So whether
RISC OS recognises the card is irrelevant - what matters is whether
RiscBSD has a kernel device driver for it. 

At the time of writing I believe this hasn't happened. One thing which I
haven't mentioned before : I spoke to Yellowstone at Acorn World 96 and
hassled them about the RapIDE NDA issue. According to them, there is now
*no problem at all* with lending the kernel team a RapIDE card and driver
source code. The only issue is that a lot of the low-level technical
information on the card isn't written down anywhere ("it's all in their
heads...") and they need to write some documentation before giving the
card away - which they haven't got round to doing yet. 

> Does anyone have the same problem, or am I alone?
> Is there any solution other than either recompiling the kernel (which I
> can't do)
> or modifying it directly? (probably close to impossible!)

I'm afraid the only solution (I think) is to let it be known that you are
interested in seeing a RapIDE driver and to then hassle Yellowstone to
give the kernel team the resources they require. In the meantime
connecting the hard disc to the on-board IDE will probably work, though
(as you say) it isn't ideal. 

amit