Re: [MiNT] Block devices

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>]

m0n0 wrote:
> I think so, maybe these link can help you?
>
> http://sparemint.atariforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/freemint/doc/programmer/block_IO.txt?rev=1.1.2.1&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
>
> http://sparemint.atariforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/freemint/doc/block_IO.txt

Thanks, that doc is useful to understand cache issues.

> I know that there is /dev/fd0, - and I believe it is what you call a
> block device.

Where is it ? I can't see it.
We are speaking of the floppy drive A:, right ?

> But I think it's an completly different story with hard-disks, as you
> know, the driver for harddisk is loaded before FreeMiNT kernel. And
> filesystem drivers directly create devices like U:/f - for example, and
> I'm not sure if they can be called block devices, because the data
> transfer ( of blocks) is done by lower layers.

We don't care if the block device is internally handled by TOS drivers 
or FreeMiNT stuff.

From the user view, a disk block device like /dev/sda is just like a 
standard file, it can be viewed, edited, copied, etc. And standard Linux 
tools like fdisk can use it to create partitions inside it.

Then partition block devices such as /dev/sda1 are similar, but for each 
partition inside a disk. They can be viewed, copied, etc, and formated 
using standard tools such as mkfatfs, etc.

I didn't check carefully, but it seems that any Linux block device tool 
(mkfatfs, df...) must be specifically patched for FreeMiNT, that's a 
real pain.

--
Vincent Rivière