On Sun, 16 Jan 2000, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > this: I think detecting disk changes is a good thing anyway, I'm just
> > saying that if I had done this originally, I wouldn't ever have bothered.
>
> You'd have been caught by changing disk during a writeback not failing all
> the further writebacks with an error. The buffer flushing only saves you
> from read detect failures. A media change detect on a mistimed disk
> change when writing is a life saver
Agreed, media change is a wonderful feature.
It's just that as it stands now, it HAS to work. There used to be floppies
around that didn't do media change right, and they simple did not work at
all (well, you could force it by hand), and it was horrible.
Media change should be a "politeness" and timeliness issue rather than a
correctness issue, and that's really all I'm saying. It's a quality of
implementation thing - you should be able to not care.
(The write-back handling will need some work at some point, we should be
more aggressive about writing things out in a timely manner to floppies in
particular. There's no reason to leave the drive idle but spinning and yet
have a ton of dirty blocks around that we're just waiting to write out.
That's independent of the media change, but would be another step into the
direction of not making it such a big deal - people should be able to
remove a floppy from a drive where the light is off without it being
necessarily catastrophic).
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jan 23 2000 - 21:00:14 EST