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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: EIDE LBA Mode and PIO 3
Date: 9 Nov 1995 19:32:33 GMT
Organization: Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah
Lines: 53
Message-ID: <47tl0h$kvp@park.uvsc.edu>
References: <47llrg$s01@macbeth.cs.duke.edu> <47oo0q$l5q@uriah.heep.sax.de> <47qonr$6on@dracula.hybrid.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hecate.artisoft.com
Kenneth Coley <coley@hybrid.com> wrote:
]
] If FreeBSD does not support LBA, then what is the maximum size drive that is
] supported on the IDE interface.
The IDE is still limited; if you mean EIDE, then the anser is 8G.
The LBA support only means anything with regard to booting. All
protected mode drivers are in fact LBA based and always have been
(which is why I call it absolute sector addressing instead of LBA:
that's what it's always been called).
The effect of "no LBA support" is that the geometry in place at
the time the second stage boot is loaded limits where on the
drive you can place the data that the second stage boot loads
to cylinder 1024 or less.
Many LBA drives (stupidly) don't do BIOS translation except via
an INT 13 TSR loaded with a tricked out MBR, which limits the
boot location to less than the 8G limit that would otherwise
be imposed by using BIOS to boot.
] Are IDE cdroms now supported?
In -current, not in the 2.0.5 release code.
] How about IDE tape drives as rare as they are?
I doubt it. I've personally never heard of such a sucker.
] What about these new pentium motherboards with two IDE controllers. Are
] four IDE hard drives a supported configuration?
If the controller probes, it can be attached, so the answer
is "yes".
] Is there any striping or mirroring software available to
] split the data accross several drives?
There is striping software, though it's not part of the default
distribution: you have to add the patches yourself.
Mirroring doesn't split the data, it duplicates it. Striping is
a concurrency speed up, mirroring is a fault tolerance mechanism
(that can result in a slight concurrency speed up on reading only,
with writing generally being twice as expensive, or worse).
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.