Subject: Re: Floppy Support for NetBSD
To: Taras Ivanenko <ivanenko@ctpa03.mit.edu>
From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@loki.stanford.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 04/24/1996 09:29:36
> 
> Don,
>   I thought about using the standard ROM driver to access the
> floppy. When you have a driver you care less about SWIM chips or any
> other piece of junk that might be inside the box. Most probably you
> will need to add few traps and few locore adresses to make the driver
> work. I am not sure about the time delays during data transfer. Maybe
> some combination of asynchronous and synchronous calls would save the
> system from hangups. 

The thing, though, is that we'll also have to impliment more
of the MacOS lomem variables; we don't know what the flopy driver
wants to have running (though it'll be easier than MRG adb as
we'll have live keyboards forst. :-)  ).

Also, all of the floppy calls are synchronous (if we don't
have DMA on the computer). Thank the Woz & Steve Jobs for that
briliance! Even A/UX froze the computer whenever you inserted
a floppy (or worse yet, formatted one).

Though not having floppy support sounds brain-dead, I think we need
other things first, like SCSI on all machines, broad-based
Ethernet, etc.

Take care,

Bill