[MiNT] Kernal questions.

[Joerg_Westheide@su.maus.de (Jörg Westheide)]

Hi Jo!

JES>I can think of atleast one, LHarc-Shell 3.10 automatically goes to
JES>u:\[drive] instead uf [drive]:\ under MiNT.
What an important feature :-(

JES>Why not just have a disk in the drive?
Because I sometimes eject the disk to take it with me.
OK I could insert a disk again, but when I notice there's none in, it's too
late ;-)

JES>On my Falcon the current kernel takes *ages* to boot if the
JES>floppydrive is empty.
That's not the empty floppy drive, that are the tons of stuff started from
mint.cnf (I moved many TSRs there) and the rc files, at least on my ST :-)

JES>IMO a much better solution than moving drives is to fix it where it
JES>needs to be fixed, i.e. MiNT's floppy-access should be improved.
That's OK too (although I linke the idea of having a root dir as empty as on
a unix system)

JES>E.g. SPIN simply returns a empty root-directory if there's no CD
JES>inserted, the same could be done for GEMDOS-drives as well.
Could it really? There's a little difference between a floppy and a CD-ROM...
How can you distinguish between an empty drive and a defective disk?
Presenting an empty dir if there's a defectiv disk isn't a good idea, because
the user may think it's just an empty one...
If this problems can be solved, it's a great idea

JES>Btw. I've noticed that floppy-access is *much* faster under MagiC6
JES>than MiNT,
Who cares in the age of floppyless computers? ;-)
But I "noticed" ;-) that MagiC has background DMA.
Wouldn't that be something more important for MiNT?
This would make the whole system feel faster and probably you could use your
computer while the hours of compiling the MiNT lib in background (which
wasn't possible when I did it some days ago)

JES>Is the TOS-BIOS to blame? If so, wouldn't it be possible to write a
JES>optimised raw floppy-device and mount the filesystems on that?
Isn't such a device available? I think I once saw something like that on an
ftp server...

Bye

                Joerg