Re: [MiNT] Bug report

[Martin-Eric Racine <q-funk@pp.fishpool.com>]

On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:

> I also notice that since Minix 70.7, the whole hard-drive is often locked
> in mid-write, when copying large files.  This results in _all_ hardware
> being locked also, while the system waits for hardware control to be
> returned (eg: serial ports are halted and packets losts, enormous lag,
> etc.) after the disk write is resumed.

OK... to be a bit more precise, what seems to happen is:

while the write-back cache is being accessed, the minix driver 
keeps the hard-disk on _write_ mode which hangs the whole hardware
in mid-air until after the hard-disk operation is completed.

All parts of hardware are affected, when this happens:

Keyboard scanning is slow and buffer misses several keystrokes,
serial ports buffers are also locked which results in 80% packets
loss, etc.

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Martin-Eric Racine       http://www.pp.fishpool.com/~q-funk/M-E/
The Atari TT030 Homepage   http://www.megacom.net/~q-funk/TT030/
New MiNT Distribution   http://members.tripod.com/~TT030/nmd.htm
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