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From: rsteiner@skypoint.com (Richard Steiner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Linux vs. FreeBSD ...
Date: 8 May 1996 01:53:59 -0500
Organization: SkyPoint Communications, Inc., Plymouth, MN, USA
Lines: 69
Message-ID: <dZDkxoHpv+EH089yn@skypoint.com>
References: <3188C1E2.45AE@onramp.net> <4mnsc5$6qo@sundial.sundial.net>
<318FD68B.60AD12F6@lambert.org> <4mouan$cpb@agate.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: rsteiner@skypoint.com
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Here in comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc, nickkral@america.CS.Berkeley.EDU
(Nick Kralevich) spake unto us, saying:
>>And you probably really meant to
>>say "saving me the agony of messing with an alpha-quality
>>IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drive". The driver works perfectly if your
>>vendor didn't violate the ATAPI specification, one way or the
>>other, or if you don't have one of the buggy (3 out of 5 of all
>>available cards) IDE controllers.
>
>Are you saying that FreeBSD doesn't work on 3 out of 5 IDE CD-ROMS?
>Ouch! Or perhaps I've misunderstood you...
In a nutshell, you've misunderstood him.
To clarify: I'm a total newbie to this group (being a Warp user who is
on his first week of exploring FreeBSD and Linux both in an attempt to
gain some element of computing wisdom <g>), but I can provide a bit of
insight into this problem.
The CMD-640 chipset and the ("infamous") RZ-1000 chipset from Intel
have some very serious problems related to concurrent disk activity
that can result in random data loss on one's hard drive.
Details are provided in the file at the bottom of this posting.
We were quite interested in this over in the comp.os.os2.* hierarchy,
since we were not members of the set {Microsoft, PC-Tech, Intel}, and
were using a semi-advanced OS (flames and giggles > /dev/null, plz)
whose creators/maintainers hadn't been let in on the little secret
about the EIDE chipset bug(s) and thus hadn't taken them into account.
As such, we were potentially vulnerable to a number of Very Bad Things
caused by the above two chipsets on a fairly large number of common PCI
mommyboards. Random bytes disappearing from areas on one's hard disk
(such as an MBR or the partition table) tend to be a bit unsettling.
Queries about the string "RZ1000" in a news database search engine
such as DejaNews will likely uncover a rather lively past discussion
about the matter in comp.os.os2.bugs and elsewhere. :-)
The URL:
http://www.intel.com/procs/support/rz1000
is one resource that still exists which describes (in Intel's words,
and somewhat imcompletely IMhO) the nature of the flaw in the RZ-1000
EIDE chipset on PCI mommyboards.
I don't know where Roedy's FAQ is currently living, though I believe
this was his last one:
ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/diskutil/eidete19.zip
I downloaded it to verify that it contains what I thunk it did <g>, and
I think you'll find it to be most interesting reading, particularly the
relatively lengthy file called EIDEFLAW.TXT.
FWIW, I believe both Linux and FreeBSD were affected by this, as were
OS/2, some flavors of Windows/NT pre-3.51, and many other OS's as well.
Whether or not it's fixed in any of these I don't frankly care, since
I Use SCSI As God Intended(tm), but it may still be of some concern to
readers in this newsgroup who are using machines more than six months
old which possess EIDE+PCI technology.
--
-Rich Steiner >>>---> rsteiner@skypoint.com >>>---> Bloomington, MN
Written offline using PC Yarn + Yes + TDE in a Warp VDM
You cannot enter the same river once.