Re: mint-aware HD driver

[Stephen Usher <Stephen.Usher@earth.ox.ac.uk>]

>> All you need is the driver in two parts, the lower part being an interrupt
>> based hardware driver 
>> which picks up requests (which included a pointer to a buffer) from a
>> queue and passes back "done" messages. The upper determines the device,
>> places a request on the queue, puts the process on the I/O pending queue and
>> returns.
>[...]
>> How's that?
>
>Not bad, although I'm concerned about the overhead that such a split
>driver would cause. But anyway, the driver's design is not the main
>problem, as I mentioned in my previous post.

Far less overhead than the current busy idle until transfer is complete type
HD drivers.

Re: your last message.

Hmm.. GEMDOS is a bit of a problem, but it's not that complex to
reimplement. In fact a lot of it IS reimplemented in the current MiNT
kernel! All it would need would be for the GEM filesystem part to be
reimplemented, the rest is being used in a multitasking mode at the moment.

>
>> But then all existing software for HD would have to be changed to use
>> >it correctly.
>> 
>> Methinks this will have to be done anyway, the current ones busy idle as far
>> as I can tell.
>
>Why should old software *have* to be changed?  Software that
>blocks I/O channels is annoying, but it's not really harmful, and
>it can still work in a multitasking environment.  Let's be
>realistic:  Most programmers do not invest any time in their old
>Atari programs and have moved to other projects/platforms, so it
>would be highly unadvisable to break old software *now*.

I wasn't taking about user level programs, thay won't see any change, I was
talking about the current batch of HD driver software, eg AHDI, ICD etc.

>
>--clausb@hpbeo79.bbn.hp.com-----------------------------------------------
>Claus Brod, MDD, HP Boeblingen      Magic is real unless declared integer.
>--#include <std_disclaimer>-----------------------------------------------
>

Steve

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