1 Apr
2015
1 Apr
'15
10:49 a.m.
On Mar 31, 2015, at 11:41 PM, Ethan Dicks
<ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 11:26 PM, Christopher Parish
<christopher.parish at parishcomputers.com> wrote:
The general rule of device drivers is to assume that the hardware is misbehaving, and
double check everything. If it looks like the seek didn?t work right, reissue it, or tell
the drive to recalibrate and then reissue it, or whatever it takes to beat the device into
conformance. In the case of the RL01/02, the details are a bit different because seek is
by delta rather than absolute cylinder number, but the basic principle carries over.
paul
Thanks for your help everyone. I finally figured
out what was happening. Something is wrong with my (everyone's?) drives.
...this could be totally normal, and the controllers/software drivers hide it.
I'd have to dig out driver code (perhaps rl.c from 2BSD would be the
quickest to read and digest if you already know C) but IIRC, yes...
all the drivers "hide this" because that's what the drives do. I
don't know chapter and verse about how they handle multiple 1-track
seek fails (the OS/8 RL8A driver probably has the least room for fancy
footwork), but they should all handle this to one degree or another.