*BSD News Article 21186


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From: michaelv@iastate.edu (Michael L. VanLoon)
Subject: Re: [NetBSD 0.9] File system corruptions
Message-ID: <michaelv.748242723@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu>
Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
References: <MARK_WEAVER.93Sep14041323@excelsior.cs.brown.edu> <CDCMwx.6DJ@veda.is> <JKH.93Sep14200134@whisker.lotus.ie>
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1993 05:12:03 GMT
Lines: 35

In <JKH.93Sep14200134@whisker.lotus.ie> jkh@whisker.lotus.ie (Jordan K. Hubbard) writes:

>>FreeBSD has the same problem, but it might manifest slightly differently
>>with different hardware, or maybe not at all with some hardware (this
>>applies to NetBSD also). The wd driver is either not stable enough or not

>Actually, FreeBSD does not use the Barsoom driver, so it's hard to say
>whether or not it will have this problem for you.  When one of our
>group attempted to run NetBSD on one of his IDE machines, it died an
>evil death, and ever since then we've decided to stick with our driver
>until we know a little more about what's wrong with the Barsoom code.

>This is an active topic of discussion on the freebsd mailing lists
>at the moment, and all I can promise is that all known bugs are
>being worked on.

I run my NetBSD 0.9 system on two Conner 3104 104MB IDE hard drives.
I used to get hangs occasionally with the root hard drive light on
solid also.  Ever since upgrading to 0.9 I've had perfect stability.
This is the first time I've been able to say that.  I also upgraded my
system from 5meg of RAM to 10meg recently, so I'm sure that's
responsible for a significant drop in drive thrashing from paging
which would help stability.  Still, with the 0.9 wd driver I haven't
had any hard drive hangs.

Why doesn't someone who really knows ST506 hard drive controllers just
sit down and write a driver from scratch that *works*?  These things
are getting a little tiring.  I haven't heard of these kinds of
problems on Linux.  This can't be such a difficult problem.

-- 
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  Michael L. VanLoon                           Project Vincent Systems Staff
  michaelv@iastate.edu              Iowa State University Computation Center
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