Subject: Re: Wicked bad MSDOS problems.
To: None <spberry@iastate.edu, david@mono.org>
From: Wolfgang Solfrank <ws@kurt.tools.de>
List: port-i386
Date: 11/25/1996 21:44:45
> > I came to two conclusions.  Doing 'mkdir' in an msdos filesystem will crash
> > the system.  (page fault something or other, easily reproduced if necessary)
> > 
> 	This was fixed recently in -current (I think it was going to be
> 	pulled into the first 1.2 patch, but I could be mistaken)

You are correct, this didn't make it into 1.2, and should be in the patch
(hopefully).

> > If a partition is greater than 512M, it will not crash, but data written to
> > the partition will be corrupted.  (executables won't, etc) (tested with
> > 400M, 450M vs 1001M partitions)
> > 
> 	That surprises me - my experience has always been that partitions
> 	with a blocksize of over 16K (ie 512MB & up) panic NetBSD/i386.

A cluster size of more than 16k is used by dos only for partitions greater
than ~1 GB, not 512 MB.

> 	IIRC something needs to be fixed inside the i386 port so a
> 	parameter can be increated from 16K to 64K.

Yes, it's a limitation on the buffer size that was introduced due to the
limited kernel virtual space.  Now the kernel virtual space limitation is
somewhat loosened, maybe it's time to consider uping the buffer size?
--
ws@TooLs.DE     (Wolfgang Solfrank, TooLs GmbH) 	+49-228-985800