24 Nov
2015
24 Nov
'15
2:02 p.m.
On 2015-11-24 16:35, Al Kossow wrote:
On 11/23/15 11:46 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
True. But having your system on an RL02 is still no fun. It's a rather
small disk, which cause some headache for larger systems.
Your native interface have the additional problem
that in addition to
requiring people to write their own device driver for any OS usage, it
will be rather difficult to get booting from it, since that
require special support.
There is no reason you can't have two simulated controllers, one small
enough and early enough to boot a range of operating systems (RL02?), then
another which exports a simple block-level interface which would be
simple enough to easily write drivers against. RL02 is also interesting because there was a 22 bit
version for qbus.
That's one definition of "interesting". :-)
I'm trying to remember if DSD had extended block
length or partioning
for their controllers.
Not sure about it, but what I normally observed was that 3rd party
controllers using large disks for some DEC disk usually put several
logical disks on one physical disk. You could call that partitioning.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol