Multi-platform distribution format (Was: Backups [was

[Paul Koning]

> On Sep 21, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se> wrote:
> ...
>> I suppose you could on a Pro, since that had its own particularly disgusting junk controller.  But I haven't seen RX50 formatting there.  My impression was that they came factory formatted, with the DEC-specific 10 sector per track format.
> 
> Ugh! The PRO controller probably was weird enough to not allow you, even though as far as I understand, it was also way more primitive than MSCP.

Way more primitive is a polite way of putting it.  Just like all other PRO controllers DEC ever built, it uses programmed I/O.  The curious thing is that the PRO bus actually appears to support DMA, but it was never used, not even for the hard drive or network interface.  All those devices do I/O to on-card memory, and then the driver has to move it to/from host memory.

I haven't tried this, but the PRO technical manual (on Bitsavers) shows that (a) there is no way to do formatting, but (b) you can configure the controller to accept, for reading but not writing, various non-RX50 formats.

	paul